Windows 11 | No Hands free mode for bluetooth earphones

This is all absolutely ridiculous and needs needs NEEDS to be solved ASAP as possible. We need an official statement about whether the effed-up state of Bluetooth profile selection in Windows 11 is something Microsoft is aware of and working on.

I have this problem, the MFR of my PC wants me to reinstall windows and then send my PC back to them. I was on a chat with Microsoft and they said the same thing, they said to reinstall windows. This is nonsense. I bought this PC in NOV 21, Bluetooth worked flawlessly across all apps. Games, music, movies everything had normal sound quality, you know like a phone.

Then all of a sudden ALL my headphones will ONLY connect as headsets. But I have a windows 10 laptop sitting right next to my 11 one. And the exact same headphones for both. On 10 you just select "headphones" from the audio window and it works fine. you can see the same audio window below. It is impossible for me to select Headphones on 11. That is the same window on 11 and on 10. But on 11 it's unresponsive.

It is a shame this behaviour.
I have 2 devices and they connect in "Hands-free" mode, one of them I can control it and the other one it is unavoidable.

It is not a driver problem, it is windows 11 hiding complexity from Bluetooth and rising a lot of problems because of it.

It is someone from Microsoft trying to fix this?

I think I might have some sort of a solution!

I've been using it for the last couple of hours and it seems to work!

This solution only enables me to use the headphones on hands-free mode (the mode with the low quality audio + mic) so it's not suitable for listening to music or anything like that.

Basically the idea is to trick windows to use the mic all the time, that way the auto switch to audio mode (which was introduced in win11 - see here, and I believe is the one causing this issue) won't trigger and the headphones will remain in the hands-free mode.

Here are the steps I did -

• Preparation Step (only need to do once) do this when you're headphone are disconnected. Not sure if this one is needed but haven't yet tested without it.
  • Go to control panel
  • Click on Sound (make sure you're not in "View by: category" mode so the Sound icon appears)
  • Click on the Recording tab
  • Right click and disable each one of the recording devices except for your headphones.
• Day to Day use - we now want the headphones to start in hands-free mode and stick to it
  • Once again, open the Sound setting and click on the Recording tab
  • Connect your headphones
  • Now, the recording tab tries to use the mic on the headphone to display the sound level, so the headphones should be in hands-free mode. As long as you keep this window open, the headphones should remain in that mode.
  • You can now go into zoom/google meet/teams/any other video conference app you use

As I said, this worked for me for the past day... even made some zoom calls and people were actually able to hear me again :)

Let me know if this helped you!

Hello Kartikey,

I had the exact same issue as you described. I use Teams a lot for work and have a custom setup (Headphones for Output, Separate Mic for Input).

After around 2 hours of searching, I found a temporary solution! https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/report-an-issue/bluetooth-devices-have-less-audio-options-bad-audio-quality-win/m-p/2831911 

Hope that helps.

Best wishes

Jamie