Bluetooth Audio Quality - SBC XQ Codec - Linux Pipewire Support

How often you use a bluetooth headset and never satisfied with quality of Audio reproduction 

you get ?

Now often there could be few reasons.

1) Bluetooth Headset earpiece quality itself.

2) Audio codec supported / in use. (SBC, AptX, AptX HD, AAC, LHDC, LDAC and more).

Normal Solution: Buy a better bluetooth audio headset with better audio codec support for better audio quality. LDAC, LHDC , AptX HD etc.

Possibly Better Solution: Use SBC-XQ audio codec on existing HW allowing higher bitrate on existing Hardware, which can save you from just throwing away your headset. 

On Linux:

Pipewire is in-place replacement library for PulseAudio (default on any Linux Distro till now) and thanks to better Bluetooth Support in pipewire and SBC-XQ - it just blows on the quality of sound reproduction that you can get from your existing Bluetooth Hardware. 

On Android custom ROM (Lineage OS and derivatives). SBC-XQ is supported - read here.

More details on SBC-XQ here. It allows bitrate as high as CBR, 551.2 kbit/s.

Things to know - 

1. Archlinux(and Manjaro) and Opensuse Tumbleweed include latest Pipewire in their repository as default replacement to PulseAudio (Old library for Linux till now). And in my experience this works great on Manjaro. (search Pipwire in your Package manager)
2. Windows 10 / MacOS do not support  SBC-XQ as of now. Anyhow they do not allow to force the audio profile that should be used. See google and there are requests open for both OS. Something Linux does really well.
3. Screenshot below on once the Year 2015+ Bluetooth Hardware is connected. Linux can show SBC-XQ audio profile.

Image 1: Pipewire on Linux supports SBC-XQ with bitrate as high as 551.kbit/s

Let me know in comments if this works for you or any other further improvements / hack around this.