All,

I need help with a Bluetooth A2DP delay problem with my CR-V. Unfortunately, Honda outright refuses to even start to troubleshoot it. So, I thought this would be the best place to turn to next.

I've got a 2014 CR-V LX AWD without Nav and a T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy S4 running KitKat. (FWIW, I can repro with my son's iPod and my Win8 laptop.) The issue is that all audio streamed over A2DP is played on a full 3 second delay. Annoying enough for playing music, it makes it useless if my kids want to play a game or watch a video.

I've got a BT HCI snoop log if that helps. I opened it in Wireshark but don't know what to look for.

Does anyone have any suggestions for what to do next?

Thanks,
Ruben

Each playing through the Honda?

Does the phone have proper Bluetooth audio without delay when working through other cars?

Hi, this is the only BT device where I've ever seen this kind of delay. My phone has no delay at all with my Plantronics headset or any non-Honda car (e.g. Nissan, Toyota, Mercedes, etc.) I've tested.

Edit: Attaching bt snoop logs from my phone: One is for my care with the delay, and one is for my Plantronics Marque 2 headset with no delay as a reference.

Does the iPod play properly through the Honda?

Over Bluetooth the iPod and my laptop have the same exact delay, but only in the Honda, not anywhere else.

Perhaps you can test this at the dealer in another 2014 Honda with the same radio.

If it also fails there, it is a Honda warranty problem, no?

Other Hondas and Acuras definitely have this problem. Honda disagrees about it being a "problem" and call it "normal operation." I'm convinced it's a firmware issue, but they refuse to investigate. So, now I'm on my own to try to prove it's a bug.

Does it misbehave when you're making a phone call? A three second latency for music is annoying. For phone calls, it's unusable. That might be your angle to fix this.

(Analogy: back in the day if your phone line had crappy audio quality and it rendered modems unusable, you'd complain that your fax machine wouldn't work, otherwise they'd laugh at you.)

DWallach, not a bad thought, but the telephone (handsfree) profile works fine. Better still, if I start playing music while on a phone call, there is no delay but the sound quality is garbage.

A2DP allows for microphone interaction, right? I'll bet something like Skype will use A2DP rather than the handset profile and would then trigger the bug.

A2DP is just for streaming audio like music. The headset profile is used for phone calls and things like Skype. So, oddly enough, Skype works great.

A2DP is one way for audio i.e. a music player. A delay shouldn't be a problem, but it would certainly frustrate me.

It's a problem if, as he said, someone is trying to watch video on the device with the audio going through bluetooth, and the audio is delayed 3 seconds. That would be unusable.

Unfortunately I'm not sure what the issue is. It's clearly a problem with the car, and I think you've done your proper diagnostic steps. Have you joined any CRV owners forums?

CR-V forums haven't been helpful so far. All the docs I've read say A2DP latency can be upwards of 120ms. I'm completely ok with that. But 3000ms is inexcusable.

Seems to be an ongoing problem:

http://www.crvownersclub.com/forums/20-mobile-electronics/17035-2012-cr-v-bluetooth-audio-delay.html

http://www.crvownersclub.com/forums/14-problems-issues/21349-2013-ex-l-awd-bluetooth-delay.html

http://www.crvownersclub.com/forums/20-m...till-there.html

-jk

Yeah, that last one is me.

I've had the singularity occur where, I google search to find out the solution to a technical problem, and I find the answer here on the EmpegBBS... with the solution having been posted by me.

That's exactly why I turned here.

For some reason Honda keeps calling it "Normal Operation". When I took it to Consumer Relations, they even went so far as to call it a "Feature." It took all my willpower not to say, "You keep using that word; I do not think it means what you think it means."

Of course it is! (I love this board for the expertise and favorable signal to noise ratio. I wish I had more to offer the community, but most of y'all are way beyond me. Still, I check in most every day.)

-jk

FWIW I think I've found the bug in Honda's code. When the Honda sends a "Service Search Attribute Request" for the "Audio Source" service on my phone it's omitting the UUID. The UUID is required. As a result, my phone responds with "Unknown service" and ends up transmitting all audio as generic data.

With the other devices I've tested, the UUID is there, my phone responds with the required information for the Audio Service, and all music gets streamed using RTP (Real Time Protocol).

On phone with Honda now.

Curious to know if you get anywhere with that, and if so, what the hoops were that you had to jump through.

These days, reporting a bug to a software company is usually just opening a ticket with their tech support by phone or by webform. But I have no idea what that path would be with a car company. With vehicle subsystems becoming increasingly dependent upon software, I wonder if car companies are figuring out ways to open those channels somehow, and if so, how they're doing it.

Nice catch, by the way.

Tony, I'm still trying to figure out how Honda is organized. In this case, I got nowhere with their "In Car Technology Support" line. Apparently there's a separate "Honda Technology Department", and that's who I spoke to today. They even gave me an email address and a case number so I could send them my traces, screenshots, and novice analysis.

/fingers crossed.

Wow. You'd think the former would have been the correct one.

... and your "novice analysis" makes it sound like you understand bluetooth better than the devs who wrote the software.

Great piece of debugging Ruben, I'm also interested to see how far you will get in trying to get that fixed.

Just to note that iirc the integrated navigation, radio, and bluetooth 'system' in my old 2006 Honda Civic FK3 was all made by Alpine (who actually seem to make a lot of OEM stuff).

Thanks guys. Not sure how far I'll get either. Yesterday I made the argument that, if I'm right (which is far from certain), that would mean the Honda Bluetooth for Audio is incompatible with every phone on the market.

I expect it's going to be a while before anything happens. At this point I'd feel much better just to hear them say, Yes, it's a bug, we're going to fix it.

I'll keep you posted.

I've forwarded a link to this thread to a Google Android insider. Dunno if/when they can engineer a workaround, and whether or not that will help you with your Samsung phone, but I'd put my money on Google doing a workaround before I'd put my money on Honda doing a bug fix.

I really appreciate that. Right now, I'm anxious to find out if the missing UUID really is the likely cause or something else. For all I know it could be a search string syntax issue, e.g. none of the working traces use colons ":" in the search string.

In the interest of completeness, I'm attaching 3 new traces. These traces include the initial pairing process through to audio playback. One trace is for the Honda, the other two are for a Plantronics bluetooth headset and a Mercedes Benz OEM head unit. Only the Honda has the delay.

Thanks again,
Ruben

Dan, while you're at it, you should tell them that the AVRCP profile for Android is awful. I have this in-car bluetooth device, and while I've been impressed with the reliability of its A2DP pairing (pretty good so far), the AVRCP profile has been absurdly frustrating.

Half of the time I get in my car, when I try tapping the button to play back audio, I can't start up whatever was playing the last time I played audio (usually my podcatcher). Normally, I'd chalk this up to issues like the app has been in the background too long and was closed, or the system can't assume what the last audio being played was.

The real frustration is when I'm currently playing audio, and tapping the button doesn't pause playback. That's just broken. About half of the time, if I press the main button on that device or try using the forward and back buttons, nothing at all happens. I bought this thing so I could keep my eyes on the road and still skip through audio, but Android is screwing it up.

I'm not blaming the device because I've always had bluetooth issues with Android, especially when it comes to AVRCP.

Matt, Thank you, thank you, thank you for bringing this device to my attention. I was looking for something like this for a while now. Well, not actively looking, but thinking "something like this must surely exist?". The only things I could come up with so far were battery powered, and I don't want those. This device seems to fit the bill perfectly. I'm using an iPhone, so hopefully that AVRCP issue you're mentioning won't bother me as much.

Edit: bought one on Amazon.

Matt,

What kind of phone do you have? The reason I ask is I had more AVRCP problems with my old Galaxy S2 than I do now with my S4. It's generally worse when there are other heavy duty apps running in the background or if one of my kids is playing a game on the phone at the same time. Other than that, AVCRP with the native controls in my Honda OEM head unit works 90% of the time. This also seems to vary by app, e.g. Google Play Music doesn't recognize Pause but Rocket Player does.

FYI, no reply from Honda, yet. Calling them now for an update.

You're welcome! I like mine despite these issues. The one other issue is that you might need a ground loop isolator if you experience a hum. I had a pretty bad hum but picked up one of these and cleared that up.


I have a Nexus 5. I've had bluetooth issues with every phone I've ever owned (and every bluetooth device I've ever owned - have I mentioned I hate bluetooth?).


I can see this varying from app to app, but I've had mostly the same experience with every app. I do tend to listen to podcasts in the car about 95% of the time, though.

At one point I even set up Tasker to open my podcatcher app when it saw my bluetooth adapter, figuring that this would bring the app to the foreground and force it to listen to any incoming bluetooth control signals. Well, the Tasker aspect of it works, but it hasn't made any difference in the reliability of the bluetooth controls.

Hmmm, how about a new app? I use Rocket Player: It supports Podcasts, supports Pause via AVRCP, and always picks up where I left off.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jrtstudio.AnotherMusicPlayer

On the downside, you have to pay extra to get gapless playback for music.

Yeah, that app does not appeal.

The issue isn't related to the app. The app supports bluetooth controls (it's right in the settings). The issue is with Android. I've had it happen with the Google Play Music app.

Sorry, man. Hope it's something that can be fixed.

FYI, I checked in with Honda on this. Unfortunately, I'm being told there is no way to get any kind of status update or even have a dialog going with them to help fix the bug. They basically said the only status update I can hope to get will when and if a firmware update comes out that fixes it.

I appreciate all the help and support on this one.

Just for kicks, I'm attaching what I think is a pretty clear illustration of the problem.

No major updates. Only that a family member has a brand new 2014 Acura MDX with Nav, hard-drive, and the high end AcuraLink feature. And it too has the 3 second delay. Took a trace and it matches up nicely with my Honda. I sent that trace to Honda along with a trace from a 2014 Toyota Camry Hybrid that has no delay.

In case anyone is still following this: Latest update from Honda is that the software engineers at Visteon are looking over the data I sent. (Visteon bought Johnson Controls's car electronics division last year.)

I remain cautiously hopeful this will get fixed before my lease ends 23 months from now.