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Poor audio quality when using Bluetooth headsets

maculateConception edited this page Jun 25, 2021 · 4 revisions

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Description

When you connect Bluetooth headsets that have a microphone, you will likely notice poor audio quality from Aural Player (and other media apps). This is because, by default, macOS will generally switch to using your headset's microphone as the system's default input device.

When this occurs, the audio codec used for Bluetooth audio transmission may be a low-quality codec (such as SBC) as the system assumes you are going to be doing something like voice conferencing for which the low quality codec will generally suffice.

Solution #1 - Select built-in input device

This solution will most likely fix the problem.

(Switching input device demo GIF)

  1. Open System Preferences, open the Sound preferences, then switch to the Input tab of the window.
  2. In the list of displayed input devices, you will likely see that your Bluetooth device has been selected as the input device.
  3. Click to select the "Built-in" input device, and wait a few seconds.
  4. The audio quality should have improved as the system should have selected a high quality codec (such as aptX) for Bluetooth audio.

If this doesn't resolve the issue, try the alternative solution detailed below.

Solution #2 - Change system Bluetooth codec settings

This solution is quite a bit more involved, but may be worthwhile in the long run.

Follow the steps clearly detailed here.

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