[pulseaudio-discuss] bluetooth latency gets gradually worse over time

[Jerome Leclanche]

On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 5:06 PM, Arun Raghavan <arun at accosted.net> wrote:
> On 1 May 2016 at 08:07,  <mudrunka at spoje.net> wrote:
>> Hello,
>> i have issue with bluetooth speaker. it creates loud pop when it's
>> (un)suspended by module-suspend-on-idle. so i proceeded to disable
>> suspend-on-idle, but when i leave it on for few hours, the latency gets
>> huge. Like 2 seconds or more. I suppose it has something to do with DAC
>> clock (or samplerate) in bluetooth speakers being little bit slower than
>> nominal. And the error adds up over time resulting in growing latency.
>>
>> When i manualy reconnect to speaker it gets fixed.
>>
>> Do you have any idea how to fix this? I think it needs something that will
>> reset the stream when no audio is played, pretty much like suspend-on-idle
>> does, but without powering the bt device off (which causes pop). it's really
>> annoying. sometimes it scares the crap out of me, when speakers are on full
>> volume and it pops when i eg. receive IM mesage. :-) also it's probably not
>> healthy for the speakers (i use conventional speakers with amp and bt
>> receiver).
>>
>> I know the popping is mostly HW error. But it can be worked around by
>> disabling suspend-on-idle, which then causes latency problems (also somehow
>> HW related). And i think the latency problem can be somehow fixed in SW by
>> restarting the stream or cleaning some buffer that causes the latency...
>>
>> BTW 2 seconds of latency are quite a lot... Is there even chance, that cheap
>> BT device has 2 second buffer? Maybe it's pulse audio that has 2 second
>> latency. And it would be easily fixed by not buffering silence. Or by
>> deleting this buffer when idle.
>
> That does sound like a large latency. Could you file a bug about that,
> and hopefully I'll get some time to test this out to see if it happens
> locally too? If we do fix that, it looks like your problem should just
> be fixed.
>
> Cheers,
> Arun
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I missed that original email, but this is something that's familiar to me.
I've been able to reproduce this exact issue very easily on the
bluetooth Parrot Zik and Parrot Zik 2 models with my btusb receiver by
running out of range of the receiver.
When out of range, a popping sound can be heard while the sound cuts
for a few milliseconds, and the sound then resumes where it initially
left off, creating a latency buffer which keeps growing every time the
headset goes out of range again.
The buffer resets when the card profile is turned off and back on (eg.
pactl set-card-profile bluez_card.... off && pactl set-card-profile
bluez_card.... a2dp_sink).

Worth noting the issue does not happen on the Parrot Zik 3, which is
compatible with Bluetooth 4.x (unlike the versions 1 and 2).

J. Leclanche