OnePlus Bluetooth codec not working

With the death of the 3.5mm headphone jack, all OEMs turned to Bluetooth audio as the primary mode of audio output from the devices. OnePlus, Samsung, Apple, and many other OEMs have killed off the 3.5mm jack in recent devices.

With this being the only viable output, save for the dongle-life, one would expect it to work well almost all the time. As OnePlus users have noted in the past few months, that is not always the case.

According to countless users across various platforms on the web, a host of OnePlus devices, including the OnePlus 6, 5T, and even the OnePlus 7T Pro, are all affected. Apparently, users who use their Bluetooth headsets to record audio have the audio come out “garbled.”

This issue seems to go deeper and many suggest that the issue could be related to Bluetooth codecs on OnePlus’ end. This has led to OnePlus users being unable to record Bluetooth audio in AAC and MP4 formats.

The 6T has been much better with that but AAC audio has been completely non-functional. While the toggle is there in the Bluetooth settings for the device, a quick trip to Developer settings will show that it is still using SBC even when AAC is enabled. Not only that, but attempting to “force” AAC there does nothing and exiting and returning to the developer settings shows that it falls back to SBC.
Source

This codecs issue is system deep and as such, users who try to troubleshoot and manually switch the codecs from within the Developer Options are having no success. This is because, according to users, the Bluetooth audio LDAC codec option keeps jumping back to ‘Streaming: Optimised for Audio Quality” option.

Many of the users who have reported this bug are running the latest OxygenOS that is based on Android 10. Could this be an Android 10 issue that is causing Bluetooth codecs to not function properly as Aptx? We cannot independently confirm that.

Affected users have also reported having the same issue on a wide range of Bluetooth devices on their OnePlus devices, from the latest Sony WH-1000m3 to Bose SoundSport earbuds. From a troubleshooting perspective, this could indeed be an issue with OnePlus’ Bluetooth codecs.

We will of course, keep an eye on this issue and update when a workaround or a fix is issued. Keep an eye on our OnePlus section for that.

PiunikaWeb started as purely an investigative tech journalism website with main focus on ‘breaking’ or ‘exclusive’ news. In no time, our stories got picked up by the likes of Forbes, Foxnews, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Engadget, The Verge, Macrumors, and many others. Want to know more about us? Head here.