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Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

And I don't think it'll get better, with Sonoma I'm seeing more and more audio switching bugs and weird behaviours when I connect headphones.

At least this balance bug disappeared, although it was plagueing me on my previous MacBook.

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I am currently experiencing an unbelievably annoying bug where once I finish on Google Meet in Firefox, all audio/video across the whole OS plays in slo-mo. I have to turn my headphones off and back on to fix it.

It's something specific to these headphones (Sony WH-C700N), as they do something different to get higher audio quality when using the microphone. Apple have helpefully removed Bluetooth Explorer from Xcode and the debug panel from the Bluetooth status bar icon, so I'm yet to figure out what mode it's using that my other headphones (Sony MDR-ZX770BN) don't.

That is so funny, sometimes I experience the exact opposite. After connecting my MacBook to my projector (ViewSonic 747), all video (Chrome, Quicktime, IINA, etc) plays like 30x faster. The only thing that helped was rebooting the laptop.

I've seen that too, and yeah, the only solution I had for the user was to reboot.

> all audio/video across the whole OS plays in slo-mo. I have to turn my headphones off and back on to fix it.

Sounds like a sample rate inconsistency issue, maybe a trip to Audio MIDI Setup.app could give hints.

Same. The annoying thing that used to happen with bluetooth headsets, where macos suddenly decides to use them for input as well as output and the audio quality drops noticeably (full duplex, bitrate, blabla), now happens even when the microphone isn't selected.

It really sucks. I'm not using a regular bluetooth headset, these are my hearing aids and my only way to get decent sound in meetings. Switching to mac last year was a mistake.

Any application or website can select the default microphone or a specific audio device which can cause that bluetooth issue. And lots of applications are enabling the microphone even if they don't need it. I don't think switching away from mac would solve that.

On KDE at least the Bluetooth widget lets you pick which audio profile to use, so if for some reason it decides to switch to a duplex profile you can just switch it back, though I can't remember the last time I was forced to do that.

The default microphone is set to another microphone.

I can assure you that I didn't have this issue in Linux. :) There were other issues, of course, but they were at least solvable.

Most conferencing applications or sites use a separate 'preferred' microphone and select that one.

I'll look into if it has something to do with that. Thanks for the tip

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