I frequently wear a pair of Bluetooth headphones paired to a computer. If I want to listen to something on my phone I have to re-pair the device to my phone.
Is it possible, through software or hardware, to have both my phone and computer connected in such a way that I can get audio output from either device to my headset simultaneously.
Yes, but you need “multipoint” headphones that are designed to do that. Low end headphones tend not to have that feature. Medium to high end often do, but make sure before you buy.
Sometimes there is a different pairing process to enable the multipoint. Look in the manual or google it for your particular headphones if it supports is it should tell you.
Appreciated.
Searching on Amazon for “noise canceling multipoint headphones” is kind of a crap shoot.
Some other searching is leading me to find there are multiple types of multipoint - simple, advanced and triple. The description for single kind of hints at that not being what I want and advanced would be preferred at minimum.
This seems to be leading to “Microsoft Surface Headphones 2” as the best entry point(?)
Depends how much you want to spend. I wouldn’t start the search with Amazon, take a gander at Head-fi.org forums.
Almost all proper headphones should support it, but it’s worth verifying before purchase.
So you’re better off shortlisting headphones you like, then narrowing by multipoint support, rather than only buying based on multipoint.
I use Sennheiser BT-4.50, and they support multipoint. (Frequently available on their outlet store for good prices). I’m almost certain any of the recent Sony XM range will too.
Just as an fyi, If you’re looking for fully wireless earbuds they’re even harder to find with multipoint BT. This is due to the fact that they’re already using it to connect to both the other bud and to the device, and at least at the time the bluetooth boards that were in production were pretty much only supporting 2 simultaneous connections. I believe more have been coming out, but when I checked a couple years ago Jabra was one of the few companies making them. Elite 75ts were what I got at the time. I really liked them, but a trip through the washing/drying machines took them out of service and I replaced them with something without the capability as I no longer needed it.
The feature is often not very well advertised, a pair of bt nc headphone I am looking at seem to not list it prominently despite being, imo, a pretty important feature. Searching by letter might not get you any accurate idea of what does and does not support multipoint.