High Fidelity Playback (A2DP Sink) Output over a bluetooth headphone, and same device for Input (mic) never work together

Question

I have this frequent issue whenever I use Zoom on Ubuntu 20.04 that my Bluetooth Headphones never work in High Fidelity Playback by default. But I can go to the Sound settings and manually change it to A2DP Sink, which greatly improves the sound quality. But the issue is that when I change the Output to High Fidelity A2DP Sink, the Input setting automatically changes to Internal Mic (from Laptop).

When I again change the Input to my Bluetooth Headphone, the output from my headphones become really bad (essentially Headset Head Unit (HSP/HFP)). It does not reflect in the Sound settings immediately, but you can hear the bad audio.

I wanted to know why the two won't work together? Is there a way to keep A2DP High Fidelity Playback Output as well as the Headphone mic for Input?

This is fixed in the latest version of Ubuntu, where Pulseaudio 0.15 is available and now you can use high quality codecs with the microphone (see "Ubuntu Desktop" in the 21.10 release notes). — muru, Dec 01 '21 at 09:19
@muru Ah I see. I looked up online on how to upgrade pulseaudio, but it looks like its deeply integrated into the OS and is not supposed to be upgraded manually. I wish there was a way to upgrade pulseaudio without upgrading the OS itself. — jar, Dec 01 '21 at 09:33
Does this answer your question? How to keep the audio profile at A2DP while using a mic with Bluetooth headset? (Push-to-talk) — David, Dec 01 '21 at 12:22
That is a good find, but that is just a workaround, not a solution because even in that answer, it is not yet possible to get both working together. — jar, Dec 01 '21 at 21:04

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 05 '23 at 09:41

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I googled a little bit and read that it's something about bluetooth bandwith. For some headsets when you activate the mic the bluetooth bandwith splits between input and output, so that's why the quality of sound really drops

answered Sep 05 '23 at 09:41

Odravison

1

High Fidelity Playback (A2DP Sink) Output over a bluetooth headphone, and same device for Input (mic) never work together

1 Answers1