I recently got shipped a new bluetooth headset for work. The headset in question was the MPOW HC5 headset. They are very comfortable and have good audio quality but when they first arrived there was a problem. The audio had a persistent echo.

The echo was isolated to the headset as there was no echo when the audio was coming through the laptop speakers.

The echo was also isolated to Windows 10 as there was no echo when the headset was plugged into an Android device.

At first I thought the problem was caused by the Windows 10 audio enhancements settings. These settings include an option for echo. However in this instance this was not the cause of the problem.

To rule out Windows 10 audio enhancements as the cause of the problem do the following:

Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Sound > Left click on Speakers (or another output device of your choosing) > Properties > Enhancements > Check “Disable all sound effects”.

In this particular case the echo problem for my headset was that playback was happening twice for the same device albeit slightly out of sync thus creating an echo. The problem was identifiable as when I traversed to the option path below I could see that the headset was registered with the OS twice under two slightly different names.

Options path:

Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Sound > Playback

I tested playback for both device names, by right clicking the device and clicking test, and found that one of the devices had a audio glitch. When this instance of the device was disabled the headphones worked without any echo.

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