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I've bought a Philips SHB4000 headset (phone+mic) wireless (bluetooth) and It has a good quality when I pair it with my phone or PC Windows but when I pair it with the same PC on Ubuntu (14.10 64 bits) the sound quality goes down.

I've been googling about but I haven't found any convincing answer.

Tks in advance! ....

RoyC
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Cleber Marques
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13 Answers13

255

Go into sound settings, then see what the SHB4000 is using. If it uses HSP/HFP change to A2DP.

screenshot

Pablo Bianchi
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Cleber Marques
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    It worked for my MPow too! – Fran Marzoa Aug 18 '16 at 11:30
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    Thanks. Just noting this worked for my Sony MDR-ZX770BN as well. – Nicholas Sep 30 '16 at 00:52
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    Seems I spoke too soon. When I change the settings from HSP/HFP to A2DP Sink, the sound cuts out and any applications which use sound stop working – Peeperkorn Mar 07 '17 at 15:49
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    This worked for me on Fedora 25. It temporarily re-routed things back through my desktop speakers, but I just swapped the Output Device back and forth a couple times and it started working perfectly. – Craig Otis May 11 '17 at 13:12
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    But for my Sony MDR-ZX770BN I can't change to A2DP: configuration not saved. Gubuntu 17.04 – demon101 Aug 18 '17 at 12:27
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    When I enable A2DP in the audio settings and click Apply, then close and reopen the settings, it's back to HSP/HFP, and the sound quality didn't change at any moment. – ChameleonScales Sep 01 '17 at 19:54
  • This worked perfectly for my JBL Charge device on Xubuntu 17.04. Just make sure you turn your volume down before doing this, because it might cause your speaker to start playing on full blast. – ExplodingKittens Sep 17 '17 at 22:08
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    This caused all audio to cut out and my bluetooth headset to disappear from the audio devices list. After a quick pulseaudio restart (pulseaudio -k) it was back and sounding glorious! – Hubro Sep 27 '17 at 15:15
  • Solved the poor quality with Audio-Technica ATH-SR5BT too. Saved my life (and Ubuntu on my PC). – Radek Skokan Oct 11 '17 at 12:08
  • thanks a lot! Quickest solution to make me happy with my headphones!) – gayavat Nov 04 '17 at 12:14
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    does not work for ubuntu 17.10 with sony WH1000MX2 – Nicky De Maeyer Mar 20 '18 at 10:35
  • Sony MDR user here, if i enable sound input trough the device it will force using HSP mode (which is crap sound quality) is this a device limitation? i do not remember having this on macbook pro though – vach Jul 30 '19 at 03:24
  • Sony user here. To fix the problem of not being able to change the profile, do the config change first as noted in on of the other answers, remove and re-add the device, then try changing again. – Vegard Sep 10 '19 at 13:04
  • Just a note: This solution worked awesomely for Ubuntu 18.10 and Boat Rockerz 255 Bluetooth earphone. With HSP/HFP it sounded horrible, with A2DP it is like HD :D Thanks! – Suvarna Pattayil Oct 07 '19 at 17:27
  • @Peeperkorn Sound cut out for me as well. I set the other two options (on Kubuntu 18.04) that say "Add virtual output device for simulataneous output on all local sound cars" and "Automatically switch all running streams when a new output becomes available". I had a video running on a streaming website, skipped forward a bit and the sound came back. – mneumann Jan 19 '20 at 21:18
  • I don't know why, but something (maybe an update) changed my settings to "HSP/HFP", reverting it to "A2DP" solved the issue. – Jaec Feb 05 '20 at 17:09
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    Worked on Sennheiser PXC-550. – Cristian Todea Nov 30 '20 at 09:00
  • How difficult is for Canonical to fix a problem which is there for decades? Something that is given and guaranteed to work on every other Operating System?... – DimiDak Sep 16 '21 at 10:27
  • Worked on Sony WH-H910N too. – Ville Laitila Nov 07 '21 at 00:54
  • Also to Monster Icon BT one, worked!! thanks! – Alon Samuel Feb 10 '22 at 09:48
  • Still works exactly the same on Ubuntu 20.04. – Felix Dombek Nov 29 '22 at 02:09
  • That makes the headset be a headphone and its microphone not being useable. – Henning Dec 14 '22 at 14:07
  • Worked for my sony WH-1000XM4 – Chamath Ranasinghe Feb 10 '23 at 11:09
37

Here is the solution that worked for me on Debian 9 (menu impossible to apply)

Important: you will have to restart bluetooth before each reconnection !

Source: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/415928/325467

I am using a SoundBuds Curve headset in Debian 9, and have had the same problem, I was unable to switch from the HSP/HFP profile to the A2DP profile.

What fixed the issue for me, was editing /etc/bluetooth/main.conf

sudo nano /etc/bluetooth/main.conf

First add the following lines under the [General] tag (copied from audio.conf, I found searching for a solution):

# Automatically connect both A2DP and HFP/HSP profiles for incoming
# connections. Some headsets that support both profiles will only connect the
# other one automatically so the default setting of true is usually a good
# idea.
AutoConnect=true

Next you must enable support for multiple profiles (a few lines below) just uncomment and set value to multiple

MultiProfile = multiple

Then restart bluetooth service

sudo systemctl restart bluetooth

Important: you will have to restart bluetooth before each reconnection !

56ka
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    The quality is now much better, but the microphone's gone :D – MonkeyMonkey Aug 08 '19 at 11:34
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    @MonkeyMonkey You have to switch back to HSP/HFP profile. – Player1 May 13 '20 at 16:42
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    This answer helped in no way. The headset works worse now. :( Before: only low quality available. After: only low quality, with disconnections and although headset "connects", the sound settings miss the bluetooth device. – Giszmo Nov 30 '20 at 01:06
  • This also worked on Ubuntu 20.20 or whatever the latest 2020 one is lol. A bit confusing as to why but whatever, thanks music no longer sounds like windows 3.11 uLaw (I'm getting old..) :) – John Hunt Dec 02 '20 at 21:34
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    Important: you will have to restart bluetooth before each reconnection !

    This is true when using my Sennheiser headphones. Sound quality is bad (as if listening from inside a cave or something). Then I restart the service and the quality much better.

     – george_h May 25 '21 at 07:55
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    Nowadays this still working, but when I switch to mic of headphones starts again the bad quality. – Mauricio Reyes Jun 06 '22 at 02:40
  • @MauricioReyes yep that's the issue... – Computer's Guy Jul 25 '22 at 09:09
14

For those experiencing this with Ubuntu 16.04, and switching to A2DP only worked once, I had to disconnect, forget the device, reconnect, switch to A2DP, for it to start working again.

(Wanted to post this as a comment, but n00b-ness prevents this)

nevakanezzar
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  • i added the below bluetooth config as per 56ka. didn't work this also nearly didn't work until I went back into audio and chose main speaker to be default then my current device boombar to be default again - it is a little flaky - and requires running through the sequences- – Vindicated Halcyon Dec 13 '18 at 15:07
12

For Ubuntu 20.04 only (seems to be fixed in 21.04)

For anyone, that uses the Microphone of their Headset with Ubuntu and complain about bad sound and speech quality:

There is a new update in Mai 2021:

With this commit, HFP can be enabled which supports wideband audio-speech via bluetooth. I was able to improve my microphone quality alot and my colleagues actually can understand me now and I dont sound like talking with an old phone.

Tested on Ubuntu 20.04 with Sony 1000-mx3

For this to work you need to clone the latest pulseaudio master from their git repository by:

git clone https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio.git

Compile and install via

meson build
sudo ninja -C build install
sudo ldconfig

Taken from the docs of pulseaudio

You might have to install source-dependencies for the compilation to work. For this goto open Software-Settings with software-properties-gtk and enable source. Then install the build-dependencies with sudo apt-get build-dep pulseaudio

Restart. Then, when you open your Sound-Settings you are able to choose the HFP-Profile, which enables much better sound-quality for VOIP. For best music-quality, still better switch to A2DP again, however, this one does not support microphone usage.

MichaelJanz
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    Amazing, I cannot believe that's finally possible - – dargmuesli Jun 08 '21 at 17:15
  • Thanks, this seems to be part of the distribution starting with ubuntu Impish release https://packages.ubuntu.com/impish/pulseaudio – cheffo Aug 27 '21 at 05:35
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    How difficult is for Canonical to fix a problem which is there for decades? Something that is given and guaranteed to work on every other Operating System?... – DimiDak Sep 16 '21 at 08:12
  • Thanks for this. It literally changes my life. I was getting ready to try replacing pulseaudio with pipewire on focal but this works wonders. – jhnwsk Nov 01 '21 at 14:03
  • to fix the errors during the meson build, of the form ERROR: Dependency "X" you need to do sudo apt install libX-dev. In my case, libtdb-dev and libsndfile-dev were the missing dependencies. For libcheck, the package doesn't exist, so needed to build from source. – TamaMcGlinn Mar 24 '22 at 10:51
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    after trying this and finding it did not work, I realised @cheffo's comment means that Ubuntu 21 already has this fix in it; only try this answer if you are still on Ubuntu 20 or lower! – TamaMcGlinn Mar 24 '22 at 11:18
  • Thanks for the hint, I will update the answer accordingly – MichaelJanz Mar 25 '22 at 07:46
6

The solution which worked for me is here

basically it says to do:

$sudo apt install pulseaudio pulseaudio-utils pavucontrol pulseaudio-module-bluetooth

then add:

[General]
Enable=Source,Sink,Media,Socket

to /etc/bluetooth/audio.conf and run:

sudo service bluetooth restart

Then reconnect your headphones and it should work. It did for me!

Eisa
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5

I had the same issue, using Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS
Whenever I connected my wireless earbuds I got static distorted sound

so I installed PulseAudio

sudo apt install pavucontrol

opened it and changed the Codec of my connected device

enter image description here

that seemed to do the trick!

cak3_lover
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3

I had to do both setting the main.conf to multiple profiles then remove the headphones and add them back and then they defaulted to High Fidelity.

Bart Burroughs
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3

May be someone will find this helpful: Don't try to switch to A2DP while some app is playing sound. You need to disable all sound outputs first, then disconnect, connect, switch to A2DP, then select A2DP device as target.

stiv
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2

So, I recently bought the JBL 700BT Headphones. I was getting muffled voice upon connecting with Ubuntu 20.04. Here's what I did to fix it:

1> sudo apt install pulseaudio pulseaudio-utils pavucontrol pulseaudio-module-bluetooth

It turns out I didn't have all of them.

2>Then edit the /etc/bluetooth/main.conf

Change MultiProfile to multiple then,

MultiProfile = multiple

3> sudo systemctl restart bluetooth

This fixed it for me. Hoping someone finds this helpful.

Ishan
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0

I am running Ubuntu 16.04 and experienced the same problem with my JBL E65BTNC headphones where changing to A2DP didn't stick. I used most of @56ka's answer but I didn't need the part where you need to set:

MultiProfile = multiple

In fact, when I did this, neither A2DP nor HSP/HFP was available. The device was listed as an output device but the sound did not come through (i.e. when I tried to test the device in Sound Settings, nothing happened). When I commented the MultiProfile option out and restarted the bluetooth service, everything worked.

BeastOfCaerbannog
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LnZ
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It should works without messing with the system configuration.

Your device is likely taken as a headset unit for some reasons.

To switch to High Fidelity, install pavucontrol if not done already.

sudo apt install pavucontrol

Connect your bluetooth device.

Go to pavucontrol, «configuration» tab, where you can select a profile for your output device, choose AD2P

  • High Fidelity Playback (AD2P Sink)
  • Headset Head Unit (HSP/HFP)
NVRM
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0

Something to check, I had Over-Amplification enabled in the sound settings which drastically affected the sound quality.

Greg Spalding
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0

I can't comment on answers because of reputation but I wanted to expand on @MichaelJanz's answer since it pointed me in the right direction but I had to do some extra steps and it might save someone a bit of time, here's what I did:

git clone https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio.git
cd pulseaudio
sudo apt-get install python3 python3-pip python3-setuptools python3-wheel ninja-build doxygen
sudo pip3 install meson
software-properties-gtk # <when window opens, tick the checkbox next to 'Source code'>
sudo apt-get build-dep pulseaudio
meson build
ninja -C build
sudo ninja -C build install
sudo ldconfig

Restart your PC and you should be able to select a new mode for you headset in sound settings, the mode is called 'HPF'.

Again, you don't need the new pulseaudio if you're already on Ubuntu 21 but this should help people who are still on 20 (not sure about older versions).

If you want to listen to some music, you can always switch to A2DP in the settings (where mic is disabled but sound is better still) and switch back to HFP when you want to use the mic.

verymadmango
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