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?
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...
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.
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.
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...
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.
