Yeah, they use their own proprietary protocol over Bluetooth Low Energy (which you can basically use as a raw packet transport).
For some reason the Bluetooth consortium was years behind the ball in standardizing a high quality bidirectional audio transport, versus the phone-quality "Hands Free Profile" and "Headset" Profile using 90s era codecs (uni-directional is fine since it uses a higher quality "Advanced Audio Distribution" profile).
The consortium launched Bluetooth Low Energy audio last year (or maybe this year?), but I'm not sure if it's actually shipping in anything yet.
Yeah, whenever I use Bluetooth headphones that have a microphone with my PC I have to be sure to disable all of the headset profiles so it doesn't switch to dial-up quality as soon as an app requests microphone access.
For some reason the Bluetooth consortium was years behind the ball in standardizing a high quality bidirectional audio transport, versus the phone-quality "Hands Free Profile" and "Headset" Profile using 90s era codecs (uni-directional is fine since it uses a higher quality "Advanced Audio Distribution" profile).
The consortium launched Bluetooth Low Energy audio last year (or maybe this year?), but I'm not sure if it's actually shipping in anything yet.