Bluetooth is throwing a conundrum with jbl headphones

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1

I don’t know how to format this correctly but my JBL 520BT headphones that have multi-point connection will stay connected to my T480s then it will say paring and not play audio but is still connected. The headphones work perfectly with my phone and my school’s mac books they hand out. i don’t think its my laptop since my earbuds before they broke worked perfectly with them ( they were sonys if that’s needed).

any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you

2

I’m using a JBL 510BT with Plasma 5 on Leap 15.6, so it might not be directly comparable. I am running:

systemctl restart bluetooth

as the root user after login. And that mostly works. If I don’t do that restart, it never connects.

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I have suspected for the last little bit that there’s a bluetooth audio issue that needs digging into - I have a bone conduction headset that I prefer using, but pretty much every day, I have to restart bluetooth or I only get the mono audio option used with the microphone (it calls this ‘headset’ for the audio out); after a restart, I can get the ‘headphone’ setting, which gives me full stereo.

Sounds like all three of us might have related issues.

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Possibly impacted by this regression?

5

Welcome to the forum.

Try running these 4 commands on the command line with the headphone “connected”

bluetoothctl devices Connected
bluetoothctl devices Trusted
bluetoothctl devices Bonded
bluetoothctl devices Paired

It should show the headset for all 4 commands, if not please post the complete output.

See also this page under Connect your headphones to Bluetooth in a robust manner. Do not follow the last section on no sound, PulseAudio is replaced by Pipewire.

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6

no, wish I was, i installed the lts kernel and that didnt help

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the thing the seems to be working was that i had to be paired with both the JBL Tune 520-BT and JBL Tune 520-BT LE

8

it did again

9

Does that mean problem solved?

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I have a particular Microsoft Bluetooth mouse which can connect to 3 devices, for whatever reason “device #3” setting on that mouse is consistently problematic and requires that I pair the device again from scratch - it’s an issue with the mouse itself (bad memory sector?) because I’m experiencing it across multiple devices (OpenSUSE and Windows) it just refuses to remember whichever device I connect it to and required that I pair it again on that same device every reboot.

Nonetheless, what I wanted to say is that pairing the device via the terminal using bluetoothctl (compared to the KDE Bluetooth GUI and Windows’ Bluetooth Settings) has given me the most consistent connection experience. Both the OpenSUSE KDE Bluetooth GUI and Windows would hang and not complete the connection to the device, where as bluetoothctl somehow just latches on and doesn’t drop it during that initial connection phase.

Run the agent:

bluetoothctl

to be greeted by its internal command prompt. Then enter:

[bluetooth]# power on
[bluetooth]# agent on
[bluetooth]# default-agent
[bluetooth]# scan on

Now make sure that your headset is in pairing mode. It should be discovered shortly. For example,

[NEW] Device 00:1D:43:6D:03:26 Lasmex LBT10

shows a device that calls itself “Lasmex LBT10” and has MAC address “00:1D:43:6D:03:26”. We will now use that MAC address to initiate the pairing:

[bluetooth]# pair 00:1D:43:6D:03:26

After pairing, you also need to explicitly connect the device (if this does not work, try the trust command below before attempting to connect):

[bluetooth]# connect 00:1D:43:6D:03:26

Finally, if you want to automatically connect to this device in the future:

[bluetooth]# trust 00:1D:43:6D:03:26
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