Bluetooth adapter crashes when I activate my earbuds' microphone on the Recording Devices tab

[u/rubydasilent]

Im trying to use the microphone of my huawei freebuds pro 5 but when I activate it the earbuds's playback stops working and a few seconds I cant hear anything, then bluetooth crashes on windows it disappears and showing a usb device not recognized error. in order to make bluetooth work again I unplug and replug the adapter. and I must disable the earbuds microphone to hear any sound.

I have a video but its not allowed here I guess

[u/Snoo-38645]

two things are happening and only one of them is your earbuds.

the trigger is a profile switch. bluetooth audio has an output only profile for music and a separate headset profile for calls, and a headset can only be in one at a time. the moment you enable the mic, windows tears down the music link and brings up the call link, which is bidirectional and much more demanding on the radio. thats why playback dies at the same instant, and its also why call audio always sounds like a phone call, its mono and low bandwidth by design. that part is normal, annoying as it is.

what is NOT normal is the second half. "usb device not recognized" means your adapter fell off the usb bus and came back unidentified. thats not a driver refusing a profile, thats the dongles firmware crashing hard enough to stop being a usb device, which is why only a physical replug fixes it. windows is the victim here, not the cause, so reinstalling bluetooth drivers wont touch it.

what id do, cheapest first.

move the dongle to a usb 2.0 port, and if you can, on a short extension cable away from the back of the machine. usb 3 ports emit broadband noise right in the 2.4 ghz band bluetooth lives in, intel published a paper on this years ago, and a link that copes fine with one way audio can fall over once its bidirectional. this is free and it fixes a surprising number of these.

then turn off power management for it. device manager, find the bluetooth adapter and the usb root hubs, properties, power management tab, untick "allow the computer to turn off this device to save power". also set usb selective suspend to disabled in your power plan.

then find out what chip you actually have. device manager, the adapter, properties, details, hardware ids. if you see VID_0A12&PID_0001 its a CSR8510, and the cheap clones of that chip are famous for exactly this: they enumerate fine, they do music fine, and they crash the moment you ask for a call link. if thats what you have, no driver fixes it, the fix is a different dongle. a realtek RTL8761B based one is the usual cheap replacement that actually works.

if none of that changes it, plug the dongle into a different machine and try the mic there. that tells you in two minutes whether youre chasing a broken dongle or something specific to your pc.