Blimey. Why is everything so complicated these days.
It’s because when Bluetooth came out, with a 10000 page spec which made any “programmer” wonder how it can possibly work at all, it worked only on Mondays and Wednesdays. About 10000 man-hours later they managed to make it work on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Now, about 15 years later, it actually works every day but only with about 3/4 of the devices it should work with. You first notice this when you try to connect your phone to your 10 year old car hands free subsystem; many hours of happy googling tells you to revert the BT “stack” in the phone to an earlier version (probably possible only on an android phone, too) and this solves it 34.7% of the time; to fix the remaining cases you have to change the car 
Or install a 3rd party BT kit which then renders parts of the car functionality inoperative… so we have two 2012 VW cars, one works with an S10E but the other doesn’t work (it stopped some years ago) with an S9. For BT this is normal.
BT was designed by a committee of hackers and anybody implementing it in a product is in for a whole load of fun with customer support, so the best solution is to not implement it at all, but when a competitor does it (regardless of whether it works) then you have to have it too. The Bose implementation probably works with the latest Iphone because nearly all US pilots use an Iphone. But you probably can’t update the firmware in a headset, so eventually that link will break.
I would never design a product with BT because it is a hostage to fortune, with potentially huge repercussions if the feature is ever relied on by some industrial customer. It works in the consumer space because stuff goes in the dustbin after a year or two.
Peter wrote:
BT was designed by a committee of hackers and anybody implementing it in a product is in for a whole load of fun with customer support, so the best solution is to not implement it at all, but when a competitor does it (regardless of whether it works) then you have to have it too.
Exactly my experience as an end user – it works inconsistently in some devices, and perfectly in others. The worst is my “old” 2013 Ford car with microsoft sync. Horrible.
Pig wrote:
Why is everything so complicated these days.
Taking inflight videos with your phone has been way more difficult 30 years ago. ;-)
LeSving wrote:
More and more people around here are using ordinary ANR headsets (Bose or Sony) and modify them using this kit from avee for aviation use. From what I am told, these non aviation headset has better noise cancellation than the an20 for instance.
This is extremely interesting, I was recently thinking if something like this wouldn’t be feasible just a few days ago, as I have the Bose 700 and I am looking for a cheap second headset for passengers.
Have you heard directly from someone using these kits? Are they really comparable to a pair of A20s?
I would not say it is as good as the Bose A20 but it is very close.
Seba wrote:
Are they really comparable to a pair of A20s?
I actually took along my QC35s yesterday to test as a possible alternative to shelling out for another pair of A20s for my wife. She reckoned they were preferable to everything but the A20s and not too far short of them. She liked that they were lighter. Will probably buy one of the aftermarket mics now.
Seba wrote:
Have you heard directly from someone using these kits?
I use it, works fine – QC25 + AvMike
QC35II plus Nflightmic is great
Have you heard directly from someone using these kits? Are they really comparable to a pair of A20s?
One of my students has one and is very happy. But then he has no previous experience with anything else. He sounds crisp and clear in the radio/intercom.
