Bluetooth Headphones

I don’t have much faith in “prime day”-style events, but this time, I really wanted to get myself a decent pair of Bluetooth headphones and get rid of faulty earbuds and other terrifying gadgets. So, following a friend suggestion, I bought a pair of Sony WH-CH700 headphones.

Of course, the tragic part was trying to get them to work with Linux. The bluez frontend on KDE categorically refused to pair with them, both on Arch Linux and Ubuntu 20.04. Even a more pragmatic approach using bluetoothctl didn’t yield better results, and the pairing failed with a blunt org.bluez.Error.AuthenticationFailed error.

But as usual, the Arch Wiki came to the rescue (link: Bluetooth Headset - Pairing fails with AuthenticationFailed), suggesting disabling “Secure Simple Pairing Mode” to force the old handshake with manual PIN entry. It is recommended to run the command after disabling the Bluetooth adapter.

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btmgmt ssp off

After this, repeating the pairing procedure should go smoothly. For example, using bluetoothctl:

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[bluetooth]# scan on
Discovery started
[CHG] Controller xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx Discovering: yes
[NEW] Device yy:yy:yy:yy:yy:yy Sony Headphones

[bluetooth]# pair yy:yy:yy:yy:yy:yy
Request PIN code
[agent] Enter PIN code: 0000

[bluetooth]# connect yy:yy:yy:yy:yy:yy
Attempting to connect to yy:yy:yy:yy:yy:yy
[CHG] Device yy:yy:yy:yy:yy:yy Connected: yes