Hi! I have an Audeze Maxwell. My wireless USB adapter broke. I tried bluetooth, but it only works well with my phone. I tried both a PCI-E bluetooth/wifi adapter and a USB bluetooth/wifi adapter on my desktop, and neither give a good connection. It’s ok for listening to music, but like they share on Audeze’s website – although it may kind of work, the quality will be unpleasant.
I’m trying to instead plug a USB cable from my headphones to my computer, and I’m not sure how to get my ARCH LINUX install to recognize the USB.
When I plug in the computer, I got a couple popups. One saying
“USB Device Connected MediaTek Inc. MT6227 phone has been plugged in.”
Then another notification that says
“USB Device Removed MediaTek Inc. MT6227 phone has been unplugged.”
Bluetooth protocol support for audio is a bit of a mess, and many Bluetooth devices (especially knock off or no-name budget brand headphones/headsets) skimp on applying the standard properly.
Absent the absolute latest Bluetooth standard support (5.3 or better), you’re usually limited by the protocol to very poor quality audio. It gets even worse of your device shows up as a headset inst4ad of heaphones/speaker since it has a mic return channel crammed into the very restricted bandwidth too. The way (mostly quality) vendors have worked around this prior to the latest Bluetooth protocol versions was to use raw data channels with negotiated compression formats and a special “escape hatch” protocol supported by Bluetooth (A2DP). Both sides had to negotiate a shared compression algorithm and implement it for sending the compressed audio so it could be decided at the destination. Poorer quality or older headphones, and older Bluetooth Linix stacks didn’t do this very well.
Not sure if any of that is applicable, but in general Bluetooth is always worse quality than wired because of bandwidth restrictions. And until Bluetooth 5.3 that added LE Audio and a related very efficient audio compression algorithm, it was a compatibility crap shoot.
Bluetooth audio works pretty well these days. I just pair my headphones and set the profile to A2DP in PulseAudio Volume Control and it works. SBC and AptX codecs should just work, but LDAC and AAC may need additional packages installed. All headphones should support SBC, but it has the lowest audio quality.