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I have a bit different setup but I pipe my USB mic through easy effects to filter out really nasty feedback loop.
If you can't dial the filters in a way that audio is acceptable then your only option would be to get a better mic.
I have a set of Sony's and I have to use an external mic otherwise it sets the device to hands free mode and the sound quality I hear is terrible, and in mono I think.
Keep the device in headset mode and any codec will do. I haven't found much difference.
Yeah I have these same headphones, and hate to break it to you, but I've only managed to successfully use them for listening to music only. As soon as you put em in headset mode, the audio quality drops to shit, regardless of codec. I also had the same problem on windows as well as linux though.
I personally have a turtle beach headset for gaming, comes with its own dongle, plug and play on any os I've tried. Sound quality obviously not for audiophile uses, doesn't quite compare with the Sonys but for gaming, they more than meet the requirements, still plenty of bass etc. I must've had em, shit, like 7 years maybe? Maybe more? Still going strong with zero issues. I've got the older generation with micro usb connector. I have relatives with the newer gen (with usb c, smaller dongle) and they are even more comfy, and again, zero issues after a couple years or so.
Okay so they look at little different to what I remember so they may well have brought out a new generation by the looks of things. I must have gen 1, then a couple friends/relatives have gen 2, they've got gen 3 out now. Do a little homework first but more than likely they will be great. They are the Turtle Beach Stealth 600.
Apologies if this reads like an ad, just offering advice lmao. Ignore my last two paragraphs if u aint interested in my opinion.
Yeah I have these same headphones, and hate to break it to you, but I’ve only managed to successfully use them for listening to music only. As soon as you put em in headset mode, the audio quality drops to shit, regardless of codec.
This is just inherent to the blutooth audio protocol. Put it in headset mode, get trash tier audio quality or disable the mic and get acceptable quality audio. There might be some proprietary extensions that bypass this but they aren't likely to be supported on Linux.
LE audio should be better in this respect, but it's not widely yet (and not by the XM4)
I also have these same headphones. They work well but often switch to mono when joining in-game chats. It's quite annoying.
On top of that, if you manually swap back to SBC or AAC your mic stops working. Such fun.
What the turtle beach, or did u mean the sonys?
The Sony l
Thanks. I was already looking at the Turtle Beach as an option so it's no ad to me.
Have at look at the AKG N9 too. Great quality audio (and has an EQ profile on AutoEQ if you want to enhance it further) and low latency + high mic quality since it uses a device specific 2.4ghz protocol.
Downside is that the dongle is only supported by the exact headset and you can't easily replace it, so don't lose the thing. We really need a audio specific protocol that isn't tied to bluetooth I think, but it is what it is.
That model of headphone supports two Bluetooth profiles. High Fidelity Playback (A2DP Sink) or Headset Head Unit (HSP/HFP).
Check your audio GUI to see if you can fiddle with that. Might be listed as "configuration".
What is your DE? Using Pipewire or PulseAudio?
Edit: A2DP doesn't support microphone input. This might be a dead-end.
Check on the audio settings what codec is actually in use? I have the XM5. I haven't used bazzite specifically, but on the steam deck they work well (for playback only, I don't play online). On KDE they work well for zoom calls. On some occasion they might connect... Wrong, using the most basic Bluetooth profile. And then they do sound like ass. Restarting Bluetooth usually fixes it, if reconnecting is not enough.
What was happening was the codec was dropping back to mono in order for enough bluetooth bandwidth to also transmit the mic. I don't think there was a way around it, it's a pure hardware limitation at this point. I could manually change the codec to a high quality option but it'd kill of the mic. I've ordered a new headset with dedicated 2.4ghz dongle. Thanks for your help.
That sounds like...a hardware issue. Maybe the antenna is broken? Any normal codec would work up to a certain distance of several meters. Unless the antenna is being blocked.
There's five codec options. I'll have a tinker and see if I can get a better one going. Thanks for the input.
SBC / SBC-XQ / AAC / CVSD / mSBC
The first three are listed as High Fidelity Playback A2DP link. The last two are Headset head unit HSP/HFP.
LDAC is the highest quality codec you can use on those. I'm not sure if you can do a microphone profile with it. Search your distro's package manager for ldac and it should give you a package to add it.
Thanks, I'll see if I can work it out for Bazzite.
FYI, SBC-XQ should be functionally just as good as LDAC and doesn't require nearly as much fiddling because it's an open standard.
Thanks. That's what I've been using. I played with the codecs with friends on discord giving feedback.
And you have to disable the two device connection setting on the headphones to use the LDAC codec on them. That threw me for a loop on mine for a bit when I was trying to get it enabled.
this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2026
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