Audio output (a2dp) is skipping a lot

Hi.

I've got an Arctic P311 bluetooth headset[1] and on my PC, I'm using a Hama Nano-Bluetooth-USB-Adapter Version 3.0+EDR Class1 dongle[2]. The system is a openSUSE 11.4 64bit PC with KDE 4.6.0 and PulseAudio pulseaudio-0.9.22-6.11.1.x86_64.

I noticed, that the audio output in a2dp mode is quite "jerky" (haven't tried the mono hsp mode). Not really surprisingly, I found a lot of messages like the following in my /var/log/messages, when I grep for "pulseaudio"[3]:

[…]

Sep  9 11:37:38 ewzw032 pulseaudio[2984]: module-bluetooth-device.c: Skipping 296858 us (= 52364 bytes) in audio stream

[…]

Sound thus sounds terrible.

When I then disconnect the Bluetooth connection and connect again, sound is fine. At least most of the time - earlier today, sound was messed up also right after building the connection.

Normally, I play music with Amarok. But I found, that even much more simple commands like the following create bad output:

paplay -d bluez_sink.00_1A_7D_60_67_1F -p /usr/share/sounds/pop.wav

  env PULSE_SINK=bluez_sink.00_1A_7D_60_67_1F \
    mpg123 -a pulse /home/ask/tmp/Test.mp3

In "lsusb", the BT dongle is this:

Bus 001 Device 048: ID 0a12:0001 Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd Bluetooth Dongle (HCI mode)

You can find the "lsusb -v" output for this device on pastebin[4].

Is there anything that can be done about this?

Links:

[1] Arctic P311 -> http://www.arctic.ac/en/p/sound/headsets/35/p311.html
[2] Hama BT Dongle -> http://x.co/Zaev --> http://www.hama.de/portal/articleId*28219728/action*2563/searchMode*1/bySearch*49238
[3] /var/log/messages -> http://pastebin.com/vUMEY9R4
[4] lsusb -v -d 0a12:0001 -> http://pastebin.com/xzYSWB9w

Best regards,

Alexander

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Hello again.

I've got a "new"/"different" Bluetooth dongle, which seems to be the same device...

In lsusb:

Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0a12:0001 Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd Bluetooth Dongle (HCI mode)

With this new BT dongle, sound is just as skippy as it was with my "old" bluetooth dongle.

I think this allows to rule out the assumption, that the BT dongle is broken. As the headsets work just fine on Android and on OS X, I think we can also conclude that the headsets are okay.

Why is it, that Linux is unable to keep up a good connection to the BT headset and thus is skipping *a lot*?

Distance between BT dongle and headset: Tested from a few centimeters to 1-2 meters. Direct line of sight. Normal office environment.

Could somebody with better knowledge maybe try to explain why this is so bad? :(

Thanks a lot,
Alexander

Alexander
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