htc

I recently got a really great set of Bluetooth stereo headphones. I have a bluetooth PocketPC Phone (Cingular 8125) loaded with Yahoo Music (The online music rental plan for $9.99/mo). Sounds like I’m heading for a great thing…

I did some research on this setup. I found a few people in newsgroups saying it worked great. The headphones arrived. I had the latest ROM from Cingular, but I couldn’t get the headset to work for music. Back to the forums to figure out what is going on.

Turns out there really isn’t any ROM support for A2Dp, except some custom ROMS (no thanks). The folks at HTC (the manufacturer) provide a A2DP stack for M$ bluetooth – for the Tornado phone. It is a few DLL files and some registry changes. It also “works” for the Wizard (8125). Works, just like “Greatness” is a relative word.

After resolving I was going to have to use a hack I made the updates, and it worked. I tuned into one of my favorite bands, David Chowder Band – sounds great. Then I head over to some instrumental music. Hmm… What’s that instrument in the background? Is that some kind of modulating electronic HISS? Yup. Back to the forums.

The hiss is apparently some sort of byproduct of the Microsoft bluetooth stack as other PocketPC devices with the Widcomm stack can tweak the sound out. Do I keep the $100 headphones or … ebay them!?

Here is the place to get the A2DP hack ->
http://www.htcwizardweb.net/node/304
This is a CAB with all the registry changes and DLL’s. Just register first, otherwise you can’t download the file in the thread.

Here are some tuning tips, YMMV ->
http://www.firstloox.org/forums/showthread.php?p=60192

Last bit of advice? OVERCLOCK! I run mine at 240Mhz and it makes up for the bluetooth stack CPU usage.