Just a quick writeup about the fixes that needs to be done to enjoy the fantastic little dac/amp on linux.
USB Cable
When using in cable mode, pulseaudio suspends the source if you are not playing anything on it. This results in some nasty disconnect. When you start playing audio again, pulseaudio reengages the dac. This takes a couple of seconds, resulting in 2-3 seconds of sound out off laptop speaker or other default sinks.
To fix this, we can configure pulseaudio to not suspend the device:
Edit the file: /etc/pulse/default.pa, and comment out the module-suspend-on-idle
### Automatically suspend sinks/sources that become idle for too long
#load-module module-suspend-on-idle
Bluetooth
To get the most out of the BTR5, we want to use ldac as the bluetooth codec. LDAC is open source, but for some reason it is not in any of the big distros defaults.
Google “how to ldac ” , and you should be good.
For Ubuntu 20.04, this is the way:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:berglh/pulseaudio-a2dp
sudo apt install libldac pulseaudio-modules-bt libavcodec-extra58 libfdk-aac1 bluez pulseaudio blueman
pulseaudio -k
pulseaudio --start