Question / Help Low quality bluetooth headphones issue on macOS

[vjpr]

I use Bose QC35s. When I am using them to listen to audio, when I open OBS, the audio quality of the music I am listening to degrades.

If I use the `Audio Midi Setup` bundled with macOS in `Application/Utilities`, I can see that the format changes to `1 ch 16-bit Integer 16.o kHz` from `2 ch 32-bit Float 28.0 kHz`.

If I remove all audio devices from OBS from the `Settings > Mic/Auxiliary Audio Device` page, and also make sure that I am not using a `Audio Input Capture` in any scenes, the audio is fine.

Also, in the `Settings > Mic/Auxiliary Audio Device`, if I set a device other than `Default output` and `Bose QC35` (or iShowU multi-device if you have configured that), then restart, it also doesn't degrade audio.

Tip: If your audio sounds bad, close OBS. It should fix itself. Otherwise, open `Preferences.app > Sound > Output` and toggle between devices. You may have to do it twice to get it to recover fully. It seems there are 2 low-quality audio settings with one much louder than the other.

Question: Anyone able to use bluetooth headphone microphone without degrading bluetooth audio output quality?

 

[Narcogen]

If you use a virtual device (iShowU, LoopBack, SoundFlower, etc) and then forward to a hardware device you should be able to listen on a low quality device such as these headphones without having MacOS or OBS change its parameters in response.