How to Improve Bluetooth Audio Quality on Linux

Re:How to Improve Bluetooth Audio Quality on Linux by niksakl on Wednesday October 14, 2020 @03:22AM (#24774056)

A HUGE issue for me is the quality during calls with a BT headset (HSP/HFP) profiles. This is a killer in my workflow as I need to be in calls all the time, and for that I need to take them through a separate windows laptop. It is crazy, I hate it. Is there a way to improve call quality?

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Re:How to Improve Bluetooth Audio Quality on Linux by lxgr on Wednesday October 14, 2020 @05:57AM (#24774912)

What you want is mSBC for HFP.

It supports 16 kHz sampling rates and sounds decent enough, although it's still a noticeable step down from modern VoIP codecs like Opus at 12 kbit/s.

The default is 64 kbit/s PCM or CVSDM, which is limited to 8 kHz and gives you potato quality comparable to POTS phone calls.

Unfortunately, not all headsets support it (Bose and Apple Airpods consistently do, in my experience), and I have no idea if common Linux Bluetooth stacks do. This seems to be a related ticket for pulseaudio: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/-/merge...

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Re:How to Improve Bluetooth Audio Quality on Linux by amelius on Wednesday October 14, 2020 @07:06AM (#24775265)

If all else fails, plug your PC into a separate BT transceiver?

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Re:How to Improve Bluetooth Audio Quality on Linux by dijit on Wednesday October 14, 2020 @03:33AM (#24774121)

this is actually a limitation of HSP.

You might have more luck with LDAC (and LDAC enabled headsets) like Sony's wh1000xm3

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Re:How to Improve Bluetooth Audio Quality on Linux by niksakl on Wednesday October 14, 2020 @03:58AM (#24774274)

The point is that the same headset works perfectly fine on windows/android/apple devices. The call quality there is just great. Only calls on Linux are with that issue.

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Re:How to Improve Bluetooth Audio Quality on Linux by pitterpatter on Wednesday October 14, 2020 @04:28AM (#24774418)

There's a patch for pulseaudio that allows bidirectional A2DP: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/-/merge...

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Re:How to Improve Bluetooth Audio Quality on Linux by lxgr on Wednesday October 14, 2020 @06:00AM (#24774935)

I'm pretty sure A2DP won't help you for calls – it's using the Bluetooth equivalent of TCP (i.e. it is connection-oriented and retransmit based), which is not appropriate for real-time communication.

You want mSBC support on HFP. Here's an open ticket for pulseaudio, for example: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/-/merge...

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Re:How to Improve Bluetooth Audio Quality on Linux by niksakl on Wednesday October 14, 2020 @05:12AM (#24774678)

Is there any plan in making it part of pulse audio shipped with Ubuntu? Is there a straight-fw way to install it somehow and enable high-quality calls for BT Headsets? I am sure that this is a very common issue especially now-days, where people have lots of calls instead of meetings due to COVID-19...

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Re:How to Improve Bluetooth Audio Quality on Linux by kn100 on Wednesday October 14, 2020 @05:45AM (#24774850)

This I'm extremely interested in trying. I am willing to bet a lot of CSR (Qualcomm) based Bluetooth hardware (a LOT of headsets seem to be based on this) probably also supports FastStream - and this would be an absolute gamechanger for me.

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Re:How to Improve Bluetooth Audio Quality on Linux by FL33TW00D on Wednesday October 14, 2020 @05:39AM (#24774825)

Have you been able to get LDAC to provide high quality audio whilst still being able to use the microphone on the XM3's?

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