Using my brand-new Sony WH-1000XM4 Headphones was not trivial. Pressing the power-button for 7 seconds brings the device in pairing mode.

Connecting to Nokia 8 Sirocco

When paired with the phone, I keep hearing “bluetooth connected” when playing music, and no music. Apparently, this is caused by Nokia’s bluetooth manager that crashes when using HD audio. Disabling the HD audio did the trick.

Connecting to Manjaro

For some reason, the HP cannot pair with the bluetooth on my MSI MPG X570 GAMING PRO CARBON WIFI mobo. Inserting a bluetooth dongle with chipset Broadcom Corp. BCM20702A0 Bluetooth 4.0 resolved that. To properly configure bluetooth devices, best is to install blueman-manager from the blueman package.

With the HP in pairing mode, perform a search on the BT dongle and pair WH-1000XM4 (the LE_WH-1000XM4 is a low-energy connection that cannot transport audio). After pairing, run the setup and indicate the device as trusted. Then, right-click on WH-1000XM4 and press Connect. You should now hear bluetooth connected on the HP and see the WH-1000XM4 in the sound settings.

When selecting the WH-1000XM4 as output device, you can select between HSP/HFP and A2DP Sink. For me, only the A2DP Sink works and gives stereo audio. When selecting the HSP/HFP, the Test button presents a mono source without actual audio. Unfortunately, the mic currently does not work. I managed to get the mic working by replacing the manjaro-firmware package with bcm20702a1-firmware yesterday on my laptop, but today, installation of the same package fails on my desktop due to a 404 on http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/wireless/USB-BT400/DR_USB_BT400_1201710_Windows.zip. Maybe that link comes back one day, maybe the HSP/HFP will be fixed in the manjaro-firmware or kernel.

Other links on the web advice to install pulseaudio-modules-bt to have LDAC support. This did not work for me, and I rolled-back to pulseaudio-bluetooth.