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I'm using a Pi 4 to receive Bluetooth audio and play it back via HDMI on a TV, using stock 32 bit Raspi OS Buster. It works out of the box, using the built in Bluetooth device.

However, at regular intervals (maybe 20-30 s) there's an audible cutout of the audio of a fraction of a second. Not very noticeable with speech but very distracting during music playback. I use an iPhone 8 as audio source.

I'm wondering about probable causes, and potential solution. Does a certain process just need higher priority, or is it more likely a hardware limitation?

Additional info:

  • The device is used as a WiFi access point, in accordance with the official guide.
  • Also occurs on 64 bit Bullseye on Pi 4 with WiFi disabled.
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  • Try loading some music into it to playback from a local source, ie., one not involving bluetooth. This could rule it out as the potential problem (audio playback on Pis has historically not been great and subject to EM interference from the the board; I dunno if this is still the case with the Pi 4 as I haven't tried it for that).
    – goldilocks ♦
    Commented Feb 25, 2022 at 15:26
  • @goldilocks Thanks for the suggestion! The Pi + OS in question can generally play video + audio fine, e.g. 1080p h.264 in VLC (unlike on the recently released 64-bit OS, for example), but I'll double check anyway. I'll also disable WiFi and report back (don't know why I didn't think of that while it was in front of me — Pi as Bluetooth audio source with WiFi enabled has traditionally been unusable, in my experience). It's using the HDMI output so shouldn't be susceptible to interference in that sense — except for the radios.
    – Andreas
    Commented Feb 25, 2022 at 15:35
  • "The Pi + OS in question can generally play video + audio fine" -> I just noticed you are playing the audio back via HDMI. I don't think the problem I mentioned earlier (EM interference from the board) affects digital audio, just the analog system for the 3.5mm jack.
    – goldilocks ♦
    Commented Feb 25, 2022 at 15:46
  • @goldilocks I edited in the HDMI part after you commented, so you didn't miss anything
    – Andreas
    Commented Feb 25, 2022 at 15:48

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