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I've been reading articles like this http://wrensound.com/should-my-wireless-audio-system-use-bluetooth-or-wifi/

I uses bluetooth to access my omni 10 harman kardon speaker. I am very disappointed with the result. The sound from bluetooth is choppy.

I wonder if it is because bluetooth has much lower bandwidth than wifi.

The problem is, while the harman kardon speaker can handle wifi, they do not have any software that allows my PC to stream sound to them directly.

So any specs? Does wifi has bigger bandwidth? Should I switch to speakers that can transmit sounds via wifi?

user4951
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2 Answers2

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Bluetooth is a low energy standard designed for short distances suitable to devices that don't require much bandwidth. It is considered a personal area network.

Wifi is developed as a larger scale network allowing greater distances and speeds.

You can see a comparison of their theoretical maximum speeds on Wikipedia.

Note that the two protocols use the same frequency band which can cause them to interfere with each other. Since wifi's signal is stronger, it will likely have a greater impact on Bluetooth than the other way around.

Furthermore, because most countries regulate which frequencies are available for home use, many other home devices could potentially use these same frequencies as well, causing even more interference.

So if you use wifi at home, even more if it's used close to your Bluetooth devices, using the same protocol on all of them may certainly improve the resulting quality.

As a final note, because of their known limitations and common sources of interference, wireless communications are always less stable than wired connections.

Julie Pelletier
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Wifi has more bandwidth (here is a comparison with Wifi direct). Nevertheless, the bluetooth bandwidth should be sufficient for high quality audio transmission.

Your choppy experience might be the result of high spectrum usage in your building. Unlike wifi with its fixed channels, bluetooth uses frequency hopping across different channels (Wiki-Link). This is nice, because it keeps up connections in situations with a lot of users. But as spectrum usage increases, the probability of collisions goes up, and packets have to be retransmitted, resulting in a lower total bandwidth and probably your choppy music experience.

You may want to try to reduce interference from other sources and see if it works better. Switch your Wifi to 5GHz, close the micro wave oven door and turn off your cordless phone base station. If the choppy experience continues, there is not much you can do about it, otherwise you may identify the culprit and try to eliminate the interference.

Martin
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