Is there a way to make the pulse audio taskbar applet to not listen to the microphone? I'm guessing it does so to show the volume picked up by the microphone visually.

The reason is that I'm using a Plantronics bluetooth headset with its USB dongle (which appears as a separate sound device), which I use for both listening to music and to make video calls. When the microphone is not accessed, the headset automatically puts itself into "high-quality audio listening" mode (A2DP), which is great for music. Also, whenever the microphone is accessed (such as I'm entering a video call), the headset automatically puts itself into real "headset" mode (mSBC), which enables the microphone and optimizes the audio quality for voice calls. Now the issue is that whenever I'm clicking the volume taskbar applet to change volume while listening to music, headset automatically changes into "headset" mode because the widget starts listening to the microphone (I'm guessing to show the microphone volume indicator). This is annoying as the quality is bad for music, the volume is usually louder in headset mode, and it stays like that for 5-10 seconds.

Once again, I'm not connecting my laptop directly through bluetooth to the headset - that's still not supported well enough.

System details: I'm on Arch (btw), using the latest KDE release (5.26.5), and I'm using pipewire as my pulseaudio server.