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OpenMove by Shokz

This is a device reference

What a machine or peripheral is, and how it presents itself to Linux. Anything learned whilst getting it to work lives elsewhere and links back here.

The OpenMove is a bone-conduction headset: it sits in front of the ear rather than over or in it, and conducts through bone, leaving the ear canal open.1 That is the whole reason it is used here, and it is also why the profile it runs in matters more than it would on a pair of headphones.
Vendor Shokz
Type Open-ear, bone conduction
Bluetooth name OpenMove by Shokz
Device class Reported to BlueZ as audio-headphones
A2DP codecs SBC, and SBC-XQ
HFP codecs mSBC, and CVSD
Identification Advertises no vendor or product ID

The four profiles it offers

PipeWire presents these as card profiles, and the priorities are the part worth writing down, because profile selection falls back to them:

Profile Transport and codec Format Priority
a2dp-sink A2DP, SBC 48 kHz stereo 132
a2dp-sink-sbc_xq A2DP, SBC-XQ 48 kHz stereo 131
headset-head-unit HSP/HFP, mSBC 16 kHz mono, with the microphone 5
headset-head-unit-cvsd HSP/HFP, CVSD 8 kHz mono, with the microphone 4

Nothing beyond SBC is on offer for music: no AAC, no aptX, no LDAC. The choice is therefore not between a good codec and a bad one but between a stereo playback-only profile and a mono profile that also carries the microphone.

The two A2DP profiles outrank the two headset profiles by a factor of twenty-six, which is the mechanism behind A Bluetooth headset reconnects in A2DP instead of the saved profile. This device is deliberately used in headset-head-unit, so that ordering has to be overridden rather than accepted.

It cannot be matched by vendor or product

The headset advertises ten service UUIDs, including Handsfree, Advanced Audio Distribution and both sides of AVRCP, alongside a Serial Port entry and a PnP Information record. The PnP record is empty in the way that matters:

bluetooth:v000ApFFFFdFFFF

Product and device identifiers are FFFF, the unset value. A rule that wants to single this device out therefore cannot key off vendor and product the way a USB rule would, and has to match on the card name that BlueZ derives from the device address instead. Both configuration fragments in the findings below do exactly that, which is also why they cannot be copied between machines unedited.

What has cost time here

Met on the Precision 5470.

The following pages link to this page:

  1. Shokz: OpenMove, last modified 2026-09-28 ↩