[pulseaudio-discuss] Bluetooth - A2DP only? Recommended headsets? Jack?

[Lennart Poettering]

On Fri, 14.08.09 08:45, Ng Oon-Ee (ngoonee at gmail.com) wrote:

> Hi all, I've been thinking of getting a bluetooth stereo headset for
> my laptop. The two I'm considering are the B Speech Calypso (perhaps
> SP if its not a big price difference) or the Jabra BT8030. I'm
> relatively confident that those will work with Pulse, as I've seen
> guides posted up here and there on pairing and sending sound through
> Pulse.

Some of the headsets are crappier than others. More problematic then
the headsets is actually the dongle you use...

The A2DP headsets I test with are Motorola S9 and Logitech
FreePulse. The former is pretty good and dual A2DP/HSP. The latter is
crap. I also have a cheap Plantronics HSP-only headset.

If you want to make sure the hw works fine with PA then your safest
bet is probably to pick the hw I test with.

> Just a few questions on the 'internals' of this, I assume Pulse
> communicates with BlueZ and uses A2DP to connect to the headsets? Is
> this pulse-specific or are there other ways of connecting (for
> example, through alsa, or jack). I'm asking because while I use Pulse
> almost all the time, sometimes (in recording or other such things) I
> use JACK, and pulseaudio-module-jack is a bit hit-and-miss
> currently.

What's your beef with the jack module? Last time I checked it it
worked fine. The BTS shows no open bug filed against the jack module,
so to me looks as if everything's fine.

There's an ALSA module for BT. It works for basic stuff, but I'd guess
the PA plugin for ALSA plus PA's native BT support actually works
better. It's mostly about the timing. 

> Besides that, does anyone here have comments on the models I've shown
> above? Any recommendations for something within a similar price range?
> I will mainly be using it for listening to music, while most
> forums/searches tell me about call-quality instead, which is quite a
> different beast.

Motorola S9 is my recommendation. Most others I played around with are
crap. I wouldn't buy a cheap one. The Logitech one is a technical
disappointment.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4