New pulseaudio supports bluetooth devices

[Michael Zanetti]

On Thursday 09 October 2008 08:30:55 Fredrik Wendt wrote:
> tor 2008-10-09 klockan 01:19 +0100 skrev Rui Miguel Silva Seabra:
> > PulseAudio 0.9.13 introduces
> > support for Bluetooth audio devices
> >
> > http://pulseaudio.org/milestone/0.9.13
>
> Very exciting. I've been using my SonyEricsson BT-headset for about 18
> months using alsa's support for bluetooth and A2DP. With Ubuntu 8.04 the
> quality (hifi) went down marginally (I haven't had the time to search on
> how to increase sbc bitpool[0] (which is my guess on what happened)).
>

53 is indeed the best setting for the bitpool. Using higher bitpool values 
doesn't increase the quality much and I haven't seen many devices (mobile 
phones, headsets...) so far that support higher values. Instead, make sure you 
are using 8 Subbands (4 Subbands really smashes down quality) and a 
blocklenght of 16 (shorter blocklengths increase data throughput). Support for 
these settings is mandatory and most likely you have already set it up this 
way.

If quality still isn't getting better I guess its the encoder you are using. I 
have seen some devices that have problems encoding/decodig with certain 
settings while other settings may work well. I haven't had any experience with 
alsa a2dp streaming so far though as I _really_ hate alsa config files. So I 
didn't take the time to setup a2dp streaming on my linux devices here...