Stuttering Audio, Tried Everything

[ddomi87]

! I hope I can help. I've been struggling with this problem for years and I've tried everything I could read on the forums. Nothing helped, and then I thought that there might be something wrong with the bluetooth headphones... and yes, that's what happened. Even though I set all inputs to 48Khz, if I connected or even connected one of the three AirPods (gen2, Pro gen1, Max) by itself, the sound deteriorated over time. If you look, for example, the microphone of the Airpods Max takes 24Khz for some reason and cannot be adjusted. The bottom line is that the solution was to completely turn off bluetooth on the MacBook and thus not give the headphones a chance to connect.

 

[michaelacaggi]

Tried a bunch of stuff. Using an HP laptop and what worked is - have it plugged in and simply changed the performance from "Balanced" to "Best Performance"

 

[AaronD]

Tried a bunch of stuff. Using an HP laptop and what worked is - have it plugged in and simply changed the performance from "Balanced" to "Best Performance"

Yes! I do that as a matter of course when I first start out, before I even try anything. Don't give it any excuse to throttle back unless it's literally melting.

I even go into the details, after setting it to Best Performance, and find a few more things to always keep on. Generally, look through ALL of the settings, regardless of what they're for or how well they're hidden because you're just going through *everything* anyway, understand what each thing does, and set it to work for you instead of the other way around.

That said though, laptops are not really known for sustained performance. It might be great for a few seconds to a few minutes, and then the stream still falls apart when it hits the absolute maximum temperature and is forced to throttle back regardless of settings, to keep from literally melting.

If you must use a laptop, look at the "Mobile Workstation" class of laptops. They're thick, heavy, and somewhat more expensive, because they have an actual cooling system! That cooling system is what allows them to keep their published performance specs for *hours* at a time, instead of just a handful of minutes at best for most everything else.