How permanently remove or disable HSP/HFP bluetooth profile

Solution 1:

Check out this answer: https://askubuntu.com/a/1119934/1025239

Copying the most important part, that just disables this "feature" the way like pulseaudio developers intended.

Open (sudo) /etc/pulse/default.pa and add auto_switch=false like this:

### Automatically load driver modules for Bluetooth hardware
.ifexists module-bluetooth-policy.so
load-module module-bluetooth-policy auto_switch=false  # <---- !
.endif

Restart pulseaudio by just killing the running instance: pulseaudio -k. After this you can restart it by using pulseaudio -D. Done. You still can switch to the HFP profile, but there is no automatic switching any more.

Solution 2:

I've been researching this for quite some time now. It turns out the idea is that most bluetooth mics don't support A2DP, so Pulse Audio is configured to switch from A2DP to HSP whenever an app that would use the microphone (such as Skype) is connected. In the end, what worked for me is the tutorial from this link: https://sandalov.org/blog/2146/

1. Modify /etc/bluetooth/audio.conf, adding the following:

[General]
Disable=Headset

2. Kill pulseaudio (it autorestarts) and restart the bluetooth service: pulseaudio -k

   sudo systemctl restart bluetooth

Hope this helps :)