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USB Bluetooth Audio Stutters

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Joined
Nov 13, 2010
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151
Motherboard
Asus Prime Z370-A
CPU
i7-8700K
Graphics
RX580
Mac
  1. MacBook Pro
Mobile Phone
  1. iOS
I'm on High Sierra 10.13.1 and my motherboard is Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H, some more specs are listed on my profile.

Note: This machine does not have wifi (wired ethernet connection) and I have switched off all wifi and bluetooth devices within 10+ meters of this machine (except the keyboard, mouse and headphones).

I have tried 4 different USB Bluetooth adapters and each has different problems:
  1. Asus BCM20702A0 USB-BT400 - mouse/keyboard mostly fine but stutter from time to time, audio is wayy better than Cambridge Silicon but still cuts out briefly every few minutes or so - Amazon link
  2. Cambridge Silicon Radio CSR8510 - mouse/keyboard are mostly fine, audio plays in super speed briefly, then stops, then plays again for super speed (entirely unusable) - Amazon link
    1. E.G. https://www.dropbox.com/s/vt6mib5xctwh9yy/Audio 3.mp4?dl=1
  3. Belkin BLUETOOTH USB +EDR ADAPTER v2.1 - mouse/keyboard stutter badly and are unusable, audio plays reasonable well, but stutters briefly every few minutes.
  4. IOGear Bluetooth 4.0 USB Micro Adapter - detected as Broadcom Corp. BCM20702A0 (BCM20702). This was recommended on other forum posts, but not really worth exporting from the US (I'm in the UK) as it's identical to the Asus adapter.
I am thinking maybe something is wrong with the USB drivers on this board? - Has anyone experienced this? - is there a solution?
 
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Some updates:
  1. Firstly moving the bluetooth adapter from a USB3.0 port to a USB2.0 helps a lot. But I was still getting stuttering if I had a mouse, keyboard and headphones paired. If I would turn off the mouse or the keyboard, the stuttering would stop, so not a great solution.
  2. The Broadcom Corp. BCM20702A0 based adapters seem to work much better, but it seems to be intermittent at best. Some times it works flawlessly and there is no stuttering and problems at all, other times, no matter what I do, the headphones stutter badly unless I turn off the mouse and/or keyboard (which is not really a solution) :(
 
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Hello. I'm experiencing audio stuttering as well. I have a WiFi Airport PCIe card and an external USB Roland Edirol audio card, it seems the WiFi card and the Edirol USB can't go along together. So I switched the WiFi off and connected the machine via Ethernet cable and the audio via the USB interface works flawlessly, no more stuttering. Maybe your Bluetooth-USB-audio issue can be compared to mine in some way? Note that I'm talking about my HP Z400 (see signature), the other build (GA-X58) has the same WiFi PCIe card and a PCIe audio card (Maya 44Xte 4+4) and never had any problem of stuttering audio even using 4 simultaneous input-outputs while the WiFi is connected to the Internet. I'm not so skilled but could it be an IRQ conflict issue of our USB ports and PCI bus? Both my machines are running High Sierra 10.13.2 but the problem exists since 10.12.x
 
I'm having the same issue with a PCIe adapter and a BCM94331CD airport card. I only experience the sound issue when there's a lot of bandwidth being used on wifi. I can reproduce it easily with a 4k video on youtube. Once in a while it will stutter with regular HD video. It's rather frustrating. Really hoping for a suggestion here.

H170 Gaming 3 mobo
 
I'm having the same issue with a PCIe adapter and a BCM94331CD airport card. I only experience the sound issue when there's a lot of bandwidth being used on wifi. I can reproduce it easily with a 4k video on youtube. Once in a while it will stutter with regular HD video. It's rather frustrating. Really hoping for a suggestion here.

H170 Gaming 3 mobo
Did you resolve this issue? I have the same problem.
 
I did not resolve this. I ended up going to a wired solution. I have updated my Airport card but I haven't tested this out yet. I could give it a go and see if I still have any issues.
 
FWIW, I have a similar motherboard, a GA-Z87X-UD5H, and had a lot of problems with Bluetooth that I *finally* seem to have solved.

I bought a Fenvi FV-HB1200 WiFi & BT, marketed for Hackintosh. It's supposed to be plug and play, no kexts needed. I've had it for about 9 months and it's been *mostly* great, allowing handoff/continuity, excellent for wifi, and mostly decent BT audio on my AirPods Pro.

However, I was experiencing audio stutters with my Airpods Pro. The stutters were mostly sporadic and mild (a half second here or there), but occasionally (with no rhyme or reason) they could be continuous and severe enough to make listening to music pointless.

So I finally revisited my kexts and realized I had a lot of legacy kexts related to my prior BT dongle:

• AirportBrcmFixup.kext
• BrcmBluetoothInjector.kext
• BrcmFirmwareData.kext
• BrcmPatchRAM2.kext

I moved all of these to the "OFF" kexts folder and rebooted. (I also updated to the latest Lilu, WhateverGreen, and AppleALC out of habit). So far so good. I'll still get random, slight stutters (e.g. a 1/4 second stutter here or there. But they mostly occur when the computer is chugging on a game). Otherwise, it's been a huge improvement on a good, but imperfect setup.

I also have a BT Apple keyboard and Magic Trackpad. Importantly: I can even use the BT keyboard during the clover bootloader, to select which brive to boot from. (It needs between 1-3 seconds to connect, so be sure to set a delay).

[I'll return and edit this if the problem returns]
 
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