Some background: my daily driver has been Linux/GNU since I was 14 (of course some dual booting was required for some games). For the longest time Bluetooth has been nothing but trouble for me ever since going full remote.
My desktop is a Fedora 35 and my laptop is a System76 Oryx Pro (intel + Nvidia variant). Both are frustrating with Bluetooth audio.
Every application that requires a telephony service i.e. MS Teams and Discord Linux (I presume pulse audio), would switch to the low quality telephone during calls. Then switch back to the high quality when it feels like it. I believe that it’s doing this for latency to keep up, however; this reminds me of my BT device from 2011 (Motorola - MOTOROKR S305) when making a phone call on Android hell we come a long ways.
yes I use pulseaudio for this and the many workarounds is starting to make me switch to another audio service. So let me ask, is there another service that audiophiles use? I mean of course most of them won’t stray away from a good old fashion cable - however being in meetings for long periods of time I would like to stand up without bringing my equipment I was thinking of getting a ATH-M50XBT2 without completely breaking the bank and I would have the option of using the wire for the DAC. I haven’t had the time to explore other headphone manufactures and I do have the wired variant of this and quite enjoy it just the headband is flaking after 6 years (mods would be appreciated). ​
It sounds like you are describing regular Bluetooth headset call quality problems.
When Bluetooth is required to be bi-directional sending your audio and receiving theirs it compensates for the lower bandwidth by reducing the quality of the audio, effectively to fit in the mic audio on the same Bluetooth connection.
I don’t have it because I don’t like them but apparently corsair have a headset that does not have this problem, and specifically markets it as a feature over others.
Lots of people are moving from Pulse to PipeWire lately, but I’m not sure how mature it is on the different distros. I use it on Arch (btw) and it works fine, but on my Ubuntu work machine, I just leave Pulse configured because I don’t have as much of a complex audio requirement there.
Frankly, my favorite wireless audio format comes in the form of a 3.5mm cable.
Same use case (bluetooth latency unbearable, shitty drivers) , different OS (OSX), I went with the nuclear approach , a Zoom USB audio interface with multiple headphones outputs, I have one wired, one to a bluetooth transmitter, and main to speakers in case I don’t want to be bothered with the headphones … OS always set to output to a ine out, and then I decide in hardware what/where I want to listen … no more bluetooth drivers in the os, no more delays/latency/high cpu task (teams) causing crappy sound distortions…
If you haven’t played with pipewire, I suggest you give it a go. It’s really quite good, and has drop in translation layers for jack and pulse.Get the sound out of your Computer on the fastest Digital route, then do your volume control, mixing, etc. in Hardware.