Fixing Bluetooth Call Quality for Bose Quietcomfort Earbuds in Linux

Finally I can use Ubuntu Mate (18.04) as company OS, so I need to get everything up and running.

I have tried a reset of my Bose Quiet Earbuds and have paired them multiple times.

Using the default pulseaudio driver you will end up having a problem:

Profile Headset

You will have mono sound and really bad microphone and playback quality.

Profile High Fidelity Playback

You will have good playback quality (stereo), but no microphone.

As I want to use the headset for MS Teams conferences this will not work.

Solution

Thanks to user morhook from askubuntu.com — you have saved my life bringing pipewire to the table!

I have tried it with the old 18.04 and it worked great, now I have multiple codecs available for the profiles offering much better quality (using the Headset profile with codec mSBC at the moment).

Here are the required steps to replace pulseaudio with pipewire:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pipewire-debian/pipewire-upstream
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install pipewire pipewire-pulse \
  pipewire-tests pipewire-locales gstreamer1.0-pipewire \
  libspa-0.2-bluetooth libspa-0.2-jack \
  pipewire-audio-client-libraries
sudo systemctl disable --global pulseaudio
sudo systemctl enable --global pipewire-pulse

Please restart — now you should be able to set the new profiles in Bluetooth manager to benefit from better quality.