[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#1095975: pipewire: Sound on bluetooth headphones garbled, when going to kitchen 6m away on all sound profiles

[Thomas Korimort]

Package: pipewire
Version: 0.3.65-3+deb12u1
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

When i upgraded to Debian 12 Bookworm, my bluetooth headphones suddenly were producing garbeled output in the kitchen 5m away from my PC. It used to work before nicely. I thought, that it could be an issue with the transmission signal strength and bought a bluetooth 5.4 USB dongle with two antennas for up to 150m range for testing, but even making sure that the 5.4 USB dongle's controller is used for USB connection, the situation did not change. THus i concluded, that it must be a problem either of the bluetooth driver or the pipewire sound system. Using A2DP audio profile on my bluetooth headphone WH-2037A the playback simply stops in the kitchen, with HSP/HFP profiles it seems the sample rate gets reduced and the sound gets garbeled and chopped up and also stops to play. This seems to be an issue with the codec interaction with the bluetooth driver maybe or generally a policy issue with the pipewire sound system. It seems as if pipewire enacts such changes of sample rate aso. on wrong information about the bluetooth connection quality. Maybe the bluetooth driver reports wrong data or the pipewire mixer policy is broken.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 12.9
   APT prefers stable-updates
   APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable-security'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 6.1.0-31-amd64 (SMP w/16 CPU threads; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=de
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages pipewire depends on:
ii  adduser                  3.134
ii  init-system-helpers      1.65.2
ii  libpipewire-0.3-modules  0.3.65-3+deb12u1
ii  pipewire-bin             0.3.65-3+deb12u1

pipewire recommends no packages.

pipewire suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information