Arch Linux

manukall

Member

Registered: 2021-02-19

Posts: 6

Bluetooth headset distorted input with PipeWire

Hi everyone,

this has been a problem for me since years, but now I'd really like to get it working. I just can't figure out how to use any of my Bluetooth headphones' microphones. I totally gave up on getting them to work with pulseaudio, but now I've set up PipeWire and was hopeful for them to work. Here's where I'm at:

I've installed pipewire-pulse, and connected the headphones. In pavucontrol, I can see my bluetooth headsets, set them to HSP/HDP and selected  either mSBC or CVSD as codec. Both choices result in bad audio output, but more importantly, extremely bad audio input. It sounds like I'm standing next to an airplane engine, and there's also a lot of cracking. In alsamixer there's no "gain" setting or so, as the wiki suggests.

I've tried this with Galaxy Buds, and with Bose QC35. Same problem with both.

Can anyone help? What else could I try?

karabaja4

Member

From: Croatia

Registered: 2008-09-14

Posts: 1,001

Website

Re: Bluetooth headset distorted input with PipeWire

I was researching this problem a while back and found that bi-directional (HFS/HFP) sound with Bluetooth headsets is not possible while maintaining reasonable audio quality.

For me this was true for both Windows 8.1/10 machines and Linux PulseAudio machines. I have no experience with trying this on PipeWire.

Check:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/question … th-headset
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1004712 … th-headset

Appearanly Linux kernel is missing some kind of support for this.

I really don't understand why phones (iPhone in my case) have no issue with this, but desktop computers still have no decent Bluetooth bi-directional support.

Like you, I'm also hoping someone has a miracle solution with PipeWire.

Last edited by karabaja4 (2022-01-11 09:23:39)

martinc2

Member

Registered: 2011-09-23

Posts: 62

Re: Bluetooth headset distorted input with PipeWire

Enabling mSBC with pipewire has worked well for me, with a variety of headsets.

manukall

Member

Registered: 2021-02-19

Posts: 6

Re: Bluetooth headset distorted input with PipeWire

@martinc2 That actually worked, I can't believe it. Thanks! I've read that in the wiki before, but since mSBC was listed in pavucontrol, I thought it was already enabled. ?