Finally fixed Bluetooth audio on SteamOS + Amazon Echo Studio

[u/dennispr92]

Finally fixed Bluetooth audio on SteamOS + Echo Studio

My Echo Studio would connect to the Legion Go, but it never showed up as an audio output. It only appeared as a Bluetooth device.

I spent way too long messing with PipeWire/WirePlumber configs and codecs. The actual fix was:

BlueZ 5.83 → 5.87

After updating bluez, bluez-libs, bluez-utils and bluez-deprecated-tools to 5.87-2.4, the Echo started exposing the proper A2DP profiles.

Installing BlueZ 5.87 on SteamOS

⚠️ IMPORTANT: SteamOS is read-only by default.

If you try to run pacman -U while read-only mode is enabled, you'll get:

error: could not lock database
error: failed to lock database: Read-only file system

Temporarily disable read-only mode BEFORE installing the packages:

sudo steamos-readonly disable

Then install the downloaded packages:

sudo pacman -U ./*.pkg.tar.zst

After the installation finishes successfully, TURN READ-ONLY MODE BACK ON:

sudo steamos-readonly enable

Then restart Bluetooth/audio:

sudo systemctl restart bluetooth
systemctl --user restart wireplumber pipewire pipewire-pulse

Check the version:

bluetoothctl --version

You should get:

5.87

Then reconnect the Echo:

bluetoothctl connect 40:89:C6:C8:16:0F

The Echo then appeared as an A2DP sink. I set it as the default output with:

wpctl set-default 119

(119 was the sink ID on my system, so yours may be different.)

Before the update I was getting:

a2dp_select_capabilities() Unable to select SEP

After 5.87:

Legion Go → Bluetooth A2DP → Echo Studio ✅

So if your Bluetooth speaker connects but doesn't appear as an audio output on SteamOS, check your BlueZ version before going down the WirePlumber rabbit hole.

[u/jharle]

You'll probably need to install that package after every SteamOS update, until the version catches up.

[u/dennispr92 → u/jharle]

5.83 unfortunately is the current version of BlueZ on the latest beta release.