Low quality sound on bluetooth headphones

[filque]

every time I turn on the bluetooth headphones (JBL TUNE 660NC), the sound in quake 2 turns on with low sound quality - like on the phone. In Windows sounds, the quality is set to 2 channel 48000hz, I have JBL hands free turned off, does anyone have a similar problem?

[Edward850]

That's because it is a phone, or trying to be rather, and disabling the hands free mode is clearly not enough to stop it from trying to enable it. Bluetooth headsets try to put themselves in a hands free mode for phonecalls whenever the microphone is engaged, and the audio quality for this has for some reason never shifted from 8khz. Quake2 uses the microphone for online multiplayer but needs a lot of the audio systems enabled well in advance for the configuration options to work.

It's the single worst audio protocol ever conceived and extremely ill suited for games, especially with its overhead latency. Bluetooth doing this is the same thing that causes users to lose audio entirely in the other thread because the rig gets pulled out completely.

[Caesar]

There is a workaround, you can disable the weird-call-mode in control panel.

https://imgur.com/a/FpwkJ6t

[Knights]

I have this exact same problem with my Bose headset and soundlink mini really odd.. I'm running win 11....

[anotherland]

Originally posted by Knights:

I have this exact same problem with my Bose headset and soundlink mini really odd.. I'm running win 11....

same problem, i cannot use them if i use the comms in call of duty so i have to just plug them directly in. weird problem, even when i disable the hands-free, it still does it.

[Scrof]

This bug sucks so bad, it's unplayable for me like that. I tried disabling all the mics on my PC and it still persists. No other game is like that! Such a shame, I'd love to play some Q2. Nightdive please!

[Edward850]

Originally posted by Scrof:

This bug sucks so bad, it's unplayable for me like that. I tried disabling all the mics on my PC and it still persists. No other game is like that! Such a shame, I'd love to play some Q2. Nightdive please! :cozyrealmroyale:

We can't offer a solution, the problem is with Bluetooth itself, it's simply not specced to support this. I don't understand why disabling the microphone on a system level doesn't resolve that but it's simply not a system we have any control over anyway. We possess zero control over Bluetooth audio.

[Scrof]

Originally posted by Edward850:

We can't offer a solution, the problem is with Bluetooth itself, it's simply not specced to support this. I don't understand why disabling the microphone on a system level doesn't resolve that but it's simply not a system we have any control over anyway. We possess zero control over Bluetooth audio.

Well it turns out it's demonstrably untrue after all. The solution in this thread fixes the issue with a single console command:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/2320/discussions/0/6812310424972407875/
No other solution helped me. Even hard disabling head-set mode for my BT headphones through Device Manager only made the sound disappear completely in the game despite the fact that in Sound settings it is disabled anyway. The game just weirdly defaults to whatever head-set is in the Device Manager instead of using Windows' actual sound settings. Looks to me as easily fixable problem? I mean I don't believe the devs have zero control over which system devices the engine chooses to use and defaulting to head-set is a stupid solution to any problem.

[Edward850]

Originally posted by Scrof:

Originally posted by Edward850:

We can't offer a solution, the problem is with Bluetooth itself, it's simply not specced to support this. I don't understand why disabling the microphone on a system level doesn't resolve that but it's simply not a system we have any control over anyway. We possess zero control over Bluetooth audio.

Well it turns out it's demonstrably untrue after all. The solution in this thread fixes the issue with a single console command:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/2320/discussions/0/6812310424972407875/
No other solution helped me. Even hard disabling head-set mode for my BT headphones through Device Manager only made the sound disappear completely in the game despite the fact that in Sound settings it is disabled anyway. The game just weirdly defaults to whatever head-set is in the Device Manager instead of using Windows' actual sound settings. Looks to me as easily fixable problem? I mean I don't believe the devs have zero control over which system devices the engine chooses to use and defaulting to head-set is a stupid solution to any problem.

Playfab uses what you set as the default communication device in the system. However it's not our audio subsystem, we don't control the microphone, and I was talking about the bluetooth's problems as is. Yes in theory if we never initialise the microphone at all then there's no issue to arise, but we need playfab running for numinous background systems, configuration properties and multiplayer in general and we don't know if you're running a bluetooth headset or not, or what you have configured as your system audio device. You have found a very obtuse work around (though it only works until you try to play online multiplayer) but it's not an actual implementable solution.

[Scrof]

I'd be pissed if I was interested in multiplayer then. Well anyway it's fine now for me. Still a weird thing, never have I encountered such an issue before.