BR/EDR disconnect caused by LE Audio interference

[spear10]

Hello,

I have a device with a ESP32-PICO-D4 using ESP-IDF v5.0.1 that pairs to phones using BR/EDR (BT Classic) to stream audio via A2DP. This works perfectly normally. Sometimes in my use case, an antenna that broadcasts audio via LE Audio comes within a meter of the device. The LE audio is transmitted at around 10 dBm as measured at the antenna. When this occurs, after 1-10 minutes, the A2DP stream stops. Then after exactly 1 minute the BR/EDR connection disconnects with a reason of LMP/LL Response Timeout. After the timeout, our device is able to re-connect to the phone immediately. The same behavior occurs with both iOS and Android phones.

Given the both BR/EDR and BLE hop channels and use different channel boundaries, I wouldn't expect the BLE traffic to completely stop the BR/EDR traffic. Is there something within the ESP BT controller that would cause this behavior? Something like jamming protection that causes the BT controller to be disabled for a minute for security reasons. If this is expected behavior by the ESP32 BT controller, is there a way to disable this protection?

Thanks for your help.