Audio quality matters to me too, and of course the AirPods are quite a compromise. The speakers in them sound good enough, but I know the microphones are not great. Mind sharing some details of your audio setup?

I do like having wireless headphones of one sort or another, so I can walk around while staying in the conversation.

Also, over-the-ear or in-the-ear (the kind that go into your ear canal) headphones don't work for me. The only kind I'm really comfortable with are the kind that sit lightly in my outer ear, e.g. AirPods and not AirPods Pro.

But in any case, I'm eager to hear about your setup. And I'm probably not the only one who would welcome better quality audio. Thanks!

As far as a microphone goes, I use a Blue Yeti on a shock mount suspended next to my desk along with a pop filter (about ~$200 USD all together). To be honest, I've had it for awhile because I've played games or talked with friends on Discord regularly for years. We all started with the inline microphones on our headsets and collectively decided to move past what we loving described as "BART station audio" since it became an almost daily activity.

As far as work goes, a few of my coworkers use RTX Voice to remove background noise since they use their gaming computers for work. For headphones, I personally like over-ear headphones and use wireless noise-cancelling headphones.

Thanks! Yes, I've always heard good things about Blue mics.

> if anything starts using the microphone, it switches modes and the audio quality goes way, way down.

Funny, I don't see this on windows, which will leave the headphones at high quality (except for when I'm speaking, at which point I don't care that much about audio) - but on Linux I have to set the audio profile for the headset to low quality in order to enable the microphone at all - so all audio out is crap as long as I'm on a call/have the microphone enabled (even muted).

Still waiting for this to improve - but looks like it'll require new hw (new Bluetooth receiver and sender).