microphone on bluetooth headset gives mangled sound

[Jason]

That's pretty cool! $6 for Bluetooth earbuds; I didn't expect that was even available unless on a slow boat from China. I haven't seen those here. Can you pick me up a pair, Bill and I'll pay you back on Thursday next?

[ssfc72]

Sure, I can pick up a box for you. It will be $6 plus the tax.

[fox]

Before I got too excited about your result, Bill, I thought I should make a test of my own, just like yours, running the Jabra Talk 15 through a PC running Ubuntu. I did so by connecting it to my Dell xps. Sure enough, it also worked and with good microphone sound. So the problem now appears more complicated as has often been the case running Ubuntu on a 5k iMac. Bluetooth works fine on this iMac, but with speakers, not mics. Running the Bluetooth mic through the iMac gives a distorted sound, and it might be because you can't get high fidelity playback with the microphone. At any rate, I'm giving up on a Bluetooth headset and mic for this Mac. Since everything connected with USB seems to work, my choices are: USB mic as a separate device; USB headset/mic like the Logitech H390 (which does work); or no mic at all and do Zoom/Jitsi calls on the MacOS side or another computer. Weird, eh?

[ssfc72]

Ok Mike, good thing you did a test of the bluetooth headset with mic, on a different computer.
I was sort of expecting your Bluetooth mic issue with the IMac was unique to that machine.

[ssfc72]

The one quirk with this excellent set of bluetooth wireless earbud headset is that with my Mint 19.1 computer,  the earbuds when turned on, default to maximum volume.  With my Mint 19.1 when the bluetooth activates, it also seems to default to max volume. This results in my ears being blasted by the sound, until I can turn the audio volume down on the computer.
This also seems to create severe audio distortion, until the computer volume control is lowered.

I have tried to set the computer volume to a low level before the bluetooth is switched on but when bluetooth takes over, it seems to default to maximum volume.

[Jason]

I'll try this and report back if I get the same issue and how to fix it if I can.