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I'm surprised.

I have the exact same headset (Jabra Evolve 75) at work and have had no issues at all using it on my 2018 MacBook Pro.

I use it daily for Slack and other VoIP calls as well as to listen to music. I usually have it paired to my phone as well, but it works just as well connected solely to the Mac.

That said, I did have an issue once with it when trying to play a game on Steam. I couldn't hear the in-game audio, only other players speaking.



Bluetooth uses different Profiles for the same functions but different purposes:

A2DP is for HiFi (ahahah) stereo audio uni directional.

HSP is for headsets, it supports "LAB" audio and headset controls (e.g. volume, answer/hangup).

HFP is for hands-free in cars and support "LAB" audio and overlaps HFP with controls.

AVRCP is for media controls which overlaps HSP (e.g. play/pause, skip/previous, volume)

So a problem with Bluetooth is that a device can support all of these profiles but usually not all at once. They have no built in Mux so can't take audio over A2DP and HSP and combine them. So the host must negotiate all of the Profiles and then decide which is the most appropriate to use since it can't do all at once.

I occasionally have a problem in my car where it establishes the A2DP connection and streams audio but not AVRCP so I can't control it.

On Windows 10, when you have a Headset connected that supports A2DP, HFP, HSP, and AVRCP things get interesting. If you're listening to music it will be streamed via A2DP to the headset, but if you get a VOIP call Windows switches to HSP to access the Mic but your headset can't Mux audio so it kills the A2DP connection. Windows will then helpfully stream your music either over HSP which sounds like ass or it will pump it out the laptop speakers. The solution I came up with is to disable HSP/HFP on Windows and route all audio capture to the build in Microphone instead of the Headset's.

Based on your description of playing Steam, I'm guessing MacOS is doing something similar. The headset can't Mux audio so it's dropping A2DP in favor of HSP audio, which would explain why you lose in-game audio but not VOIP.

I'll have to play around with my Mac and see how it handles this.


There's a subtler issue where you can use a number of different codecs with something like A2DP. There should be a lowest common denominator of common support mandated by the spec, but you can get into fun with codec negotiation.


Yeah, I didn't mention that though because even the lowest quality A2DP codec is light years ahead of HFP or HSP which are both optimized for low bitrate monaural audio.


I have a different Jabra headset (Elite 65t) which works fine on my Linux laptop. And the title of the OP's article is actually misleading - Jabra says they don't support the configuration, not that it "won't work." This is actually totally understandable to me, the bluetooth hardware/software ecosystem in PCs is esoteric and frustrating, and it makes sense that Jabra would provide a solution that bypasses it.


Interesting. I think Jabra itself does not understand why the Bluetooth connection does (not) work.




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