Hi! I have an Audeze Maxwell. My wireless USB adapter broke. I tried bluetooth, but it only works well with my phone. I tried both a PCI-E bluetooth/wifi adapter and a USB bluetooth/wifi adapter on my desktop, and neither give a good connection. It’s ok for listening to music, but like they share on Audeze’s website – although it may kind of work, the quality will be unpleasant.
I’m trying to instead plug a USB cable from my headphones to my computer, and I’m not sure how to get my ARCH LINUX install to recognize the USB.
When I plug in the computer, I got a couple popups. One saying
“USB Device Connected MediaTek Inc. MT6227 phone has been plugged in.”
Then another notification that says
“USB Device Removed MediaTek Inc. MT6227 phone has been unplugged.”
Possibly a stupid question, but are you using the wireless dongle that came with the headphones? I have the same headphones and run arch as well, and my pc recognizes the dongle as “Audeze Maxwell usb” or something like that.
I’m running pipewire for my audio system and iirc it worked out of the gate with these headphones, though I did some modifications to get digital surround sound working too.
It works great but only with the wireless dongle. It works poorly with Bluetooth, and doesn’t work at all with direct USB connection. My original question was hoping to see if I could quickly resolve direct USB connection with the headphones since that seems like it may be the easier to get a great connection.
I’m also on ArchLinux!
Oh sorry I was in a rush reading your post the first time and fully missed that your wireless adapter was broken lol. Do you have a 3.5mm audio cable to use? I honestly don’t even know if the USB port supports audio but my gut feeling would be charging only (can’t imagine why they’d bother putting a DAC in the headphones). I won’t have my headphones or my pc for a couple days but I can poke around with this after that if you want anything tested on another similar setup, by then.
Bluetooth protocol support for audio is a bit of a mess, and many Bluetooth devices (especially knock off or no-name budget brand headphones/headsets) skimp on applying the standard properly.
Absent the absolute latest Bluetooth standard support (5.3 or better), you’re usually limited by the protocol to very poor quality audio. It gets even worse of your device shows up as a headset inst4ad of heaphones/speaker since it has a mic return channel crammed into the very restricted bandwidth too. The way (mostly quality) vendors have worked around this prior to the latest Bluetooth protocol versions was to use raw data channels with negotiated compression formats and a special “escape hatch” protocol supported by Bluetooth (A2DP). Both sides had to negotiate a shared compression algorithm and implement it for sending the compressed audio so it could be decided at the destination. Poorer quality or older headphones, and older Bluetooth Linix stacks didn’t do this very well.
Not sure if any of that is applicable, but in general Bluetooth is always worse quality than wired because of bandwidth restrictions. And until Bluetooth 5.3 that added LE Audio and a related very efficient audio compression algorithm, it was a compatibility crap shoot.
Bluetooth audio works pretty well these days. I just pair my headphones and set the profile to A2DP in PulseAudio Volume Control and it works. SBC and AptX codecs should just work, but LDAC and AAC may need additional packages installed. All headphones should support SBC, but it has the lowest audio quality.
This should just be working if it’s standard USB audio; I’d recommend just researching issues with USB headphones in general. Maybe also try another cable.
If nothing works, it looks like you can use a double 3.5mm cable on this model, which pretty much every large retailer with an electronics section should have.
Define “give a good connection”. If it’s activating the microphone too, the connection quality will drop because of the bandwidth requirements.
I’m looking to use the microphone too.
How ancient is your arch install? Are you even on pipewire? That’s what you need for stable good quality bluetooth audio, pulse is awful by comparison.
I just installed it this summer using ArchInstall. I’m on Pipewire as well.
I used some old USB-C headphones from an old google pixel phone for a long time, no issues at all good quality.
