Sony WH-1000xm3 - Bluetooth fix Sound on Linux

I have the Sony WH-1000xm3. I bought them a couple of years ago and they are great. I really love them. The Noise Canceling was fantastic years ago. Maybe its currently outdated, but i love them either.

But there where some Problems on Windows i had two devices one for Music and one for audio calls with lower audio quality. But they connected and they worked. Not perfect but they worked.

But i changed to Linux and faced completely different problems. I neither got the headset connected via Bluetooth. Via aux i had no problems. Audio and microphone worked fine. But via Bluetooth i had many problems.

In this article i am describing my story of how i got them to work. If some points are useless just go ahead and contact me and i will remove them.

Preperation

Make shure you have Pipewire installed. I am currently on Arch so i head over to Pipewire docs and installed it.

sudo pacman -S pipewire pipewire-pulse

sudo apt install pipewire pipewire-pulse

Install bluez if not allready installed:

sudo pacman -S bluez bluez-utils

sudo apt install bluez bluez-utils

Connect the Headphone

First i thought: "Yeah just connect them and i am ready". That was a sweet dream...

So to connect them it took me several steps. I have them from this Forum Post

sudo systemctl start bluetooth
sudo systemctl status bluetooth
bluetoothctl list
bluetoothctl devices
sudo systemctl enable bluetooth

Then reboot....

Maybe they are not correct but for me they worked.

After the reboot you should be able to connect with the Headphones.

If not you can connect them manually (Commands from Arch Docs):

bluetoothctl
default-agent
power on
scan on

Wait until your Headphones appear and copy their address.

Then enter following commands:

pair [ADDRESS]
connect [ADDRESS]

Your Headphones should be now connected.

Now go ahead and test them. In my case the sound was very muddy. This is because your headphones are now in the "Microphone-enabled -shitty-sound-mode" as i call it. To get the clear sound we all want you have to check the config of Pipewire. It took me some time to figure this out. But go ahead to the new Pipewire config location:

cd /usr/share/pipewire
ls -la

you will see some configuration for Pipewire. Here you can change the general behaviour of Pipewire. But we just want to change the bluez behaviour so we go ahead to the media-session.d directory:

cd media-session.d

then we go ahead and edit the bluez-monitor.conf file:

nano bluez-monitor.conf

micro bluez-monitor.conf

Enable msbc-support:

Under properties change this line

bluez5.msbc-support   = false

to the following:

bluez5.msbc-support   = true

Optional: Enable scx-xq-support

If you want you can enable the scx-xq-support aswell. Change this line

bluez5.sbc-xq-support = false

to the following:

bluez5.sbc-xq-support = true

Set Headset roles:

Below this line

#bluez5.headset-roles = [ hsp_hs hsp_ag hfp_hf hfp_ag ]

insert the following

bluez5.headset-roles = [hsp_hs hsp_ag hfp_hf]

And reboot again...

Now you should be able to connect your Headset and have crystal clear sound on your nice Linux PC.