Spoofing a TOZO headphone in order to pair the left with the right.

Last modified : 11 Jan, 2024

This seems to be a fairly common problem. I faced it too. Despite following instructions to “hard-reset”, the left and right headphones would just not pair with each other. I was able to pair each individual headphone with my laptop, which forced me to hear audio from only 1 side. I tried draining the battery completely in the hope that it would be akin to a “factory-reset”, but that didn’t help either.

I was able to make the 2 headphones (TOZO-T10-L and TOZO-T10-R) pair with each other using Linux bluetooth commands. My strategy was to

  1. turn off TOZO-T10-L
  2. Change my laptop bluetooth adapter to pretend to be TOZO-T10-L
  3. Turn on TOZO-T10-R
  4. Pair TOZO-T10-R with my laptop (which is pretending to be TOZO-T10-L)
  5. Turn off TOZO-T10-R
  6. Turn off bluetooth on my laptop.
  7. Turn on both TOZO-T10-L and TOZO-T10-R

Turns out the above process did actually work for me and I was able to save my perfectly usable TOZO headphones from the trash.

I first gathered the information about the headphones using $ bt-device -l Added devices: TOZO-T10-L (00:00:00:03:07:8F) TOZO-T10-R (00:00:00:00:3B:7F)

I also saved my laptop’s real bluetooth configuration in a temporary file. The output of the command: $ btmgmt info Index list with 1 item hci0: Primary controller addr 01:23:45:67:89:00 version 12 manufacturer 2 class 0x7c010c supported settings: powered connectable fast-connectable discoverable bondable link-security ssp br/edr le advertising secure-conn debug-keys privacy configuration static-addr phy-configuration wide-band-speech cis-central cis-peripheral current settings: powered connectable discoverable bondable ssp br/edr le secure-conn cis-central cis-peripheral name something short name hci0: Configuration options supported options: public-address missing options:

Then turn off TOZO-T10-L and TOZO-T10-R. Make my laptop pretend to be TOZO-T10-L: $ sudo btmgmt public-addr 00:00:00:03:07:8F $ sudo btmgmt name TOZO-T10-L

Turn on TOZO-T10-R. Pair my laptop again with TOZO-T10-R using: $ sudo btmgmt unpair 00:00:00:00:3B:7F $ sudo btmgmt pair 00:00:00:00:3B:7F

Then turn off my laptop bluetooth (using the GUI). Turn off both headphones. Turn on both headphones. At this point my two headphones paired with each other and TOZO-T10-R was open to be paired with a device. I turned them both off and un-spoofed my laptop using. $ sudo btmgmt public-addr 01:23:45:67:89:00 $ sudo btmgmt name something

Turning them all again, I was able to pair everything perfectly and the audio came from left and right headphones correctly.

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