Poly Blackwire 5220 muting itself on Windows 10 22H2

[James @ LCF]

Hi All! We've been having some issues with an increasing number of our Poly Blackwire 5220 headsets muting themselves while our contact center agents are in the middle of a call, and we've run out of ideas as to what might be the cause. It seems to happen at random, we'll hear the Muted audio cue and notice the red indicator light activate on the dongle without having touched the Mute button and have to unmute by hitting the button again. So far, we've tried the following without success:

• Checking the headset and dongle for physical damage
• Unplugging the headset and plugging it back in
• Plugging the headset into different USB ports on the laptop
• Unplugging the headset from the dongle and plugging it back into the dongle
• Uninstalling the headset drivers from Device Manager and checking for updates
• Uninstalling Windows audio drivers and checking for updates
• Updating the headset firmware through Plantronics/Poly Hub
• Disabling the "Fn" keys on the laptop keyboard, one of which is a microphone mute
• Performing all available Windows updates
• Updating the laptop's BIOS

We're currently using Dell Latitude 5490s running Windows 10 22H2 (ver. 10.0.19045 Build 19045), and the issue seems to have persisted between 2 different web-based contact center platforms. Our temporary workaround has been swapping the headsets completely out, but even that is starting to prove unsuccessful. 

Has anyone else run into any similar issues or have any advice? It's possible we just received a defective batch from our supplier but I'm hoping to find some guidance on how to stop the issue from happening if it's possible. I've also recently noticed Plantronics/Poly Hub has an option to increase the level of logging it records, would increasing that potentially be helpful when troubleshooting something like this? I'm grateful for any and all suggestions at this point.

[James @ LCF]

Apologies, I forgot to include some of the relevant information about the devices:

• Headset Firmware: v.223
• OS and HUB/Lens version: Windows 10 22H2 (ver. 10.0.19045 Build 19045); HUB Version 3.24.2 | Build 36336
• Softphone/UC application name and version in use: Genesys Cloud Contact Center, Dec. 7 release (Sorry I'm having trouble finding an actual version # if there is one)
• Issue on one specific PC or with other PC’s too?: Multiple PCs
• Type of connection used: Plugged directly into laptop

[SteffenBaierUK]

Hello James @ LCF ,

Welcome to the Poly Community.

The best and quickest way forward is to contact our Support organization as the community is run by volunteers only.

Please ensure to provide some feedback if this reply has helped you so other users can profit from your experience.

Best Regards

Steffen Baier

[James @ LCF]

Hi Steffen,

Thanks for your suggestion. I'll definitely reach out to the Poly Support org to see if we can find a solution. If we do, I'll be sure to update this post with that solution for others to see.

Thank You!

[Julio E]

Hi James, 

Just wondering if you ever found a solution for your issue, we recently started having this same issue in our company.

[bhartle1]

I've had this issue with my Poly Blackwire 8225-M as well at times, but let me ask something - do you have Plantronics Hub as well?  I found that some of the events from some software things that integrates with overlaps and causes problems.  What I ended up having to do was declare MS Teams to be the primary event and I turned off the following plantronics hub events since I always have my headset connected:

Turned off (meaning disabled):  Headset Attached, On Call, Headset Detached

Left on (meaning eanbled): Incoming call

Teams already has events for everything but incoming calls, and the on call event was interfering with the hub displaying the proper status.

Hope the above helps

[James @ LCF]

So after more testing, I'm almost positive that Teams is the one causing this. It seems to happen after our agents leave a Teams meeting muted: the dongle will have some weird, erratic behavior where it will get stuck on Mute or just start toggling on its own. We've also tested with a different model headset, the Yealink UH36 Dual, and haven't been able to reproduce the same issue (Yealink states that they're "Teams Certified," whatever that means). I'll try this out and see if that fixes things, but for the moment, our current workaround to get the Blackwires to behave is:

1. Close Teams
2. Close Genesys Cloud
3. Close Poly Hub
4. Uninstall Microphone and Headset drivers
5. Unplug, replug
6. Open Poly Hub
7. Open Genesys Cloud
8. Open Teams

Thanks!