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MacBook sound balance changes on its own

21 points| arthurmorgan | 3 years ago |superuser.com

10 comments

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zhala|3 years ago

Iirc this has been an issue with Mac os/osx for many years. Seems like a very tricky bug to hunt down, I only encounter it maybe twice a month.

bouke|3 years ago

Having been bothered by this bug for many years I can only assume they don’t care.

donatj|3 years ago

I was just complaining to a coworker about this on Friday. I have to correct my audio balance all the time, it’s obnoxious.

navjack27|3 years ago

Every single system update or sometimes even reboot I have to do this on my M1 Mac Mini that has a fiio DAC connected to it over USB. It will always be all the way left or partially left balanced when it boots back up. It's especially annoying because I get frequent beta test updates for MacOS, so it's not like an occasional thing.

I don't care about the why this happens. I don't care that the DAC I use is really old. This is just a thing that shouldn't be happening on a modern operating system that has such an apparently old pedigree in high quality audio.

cweagans|3 years ago

I automated a fix for this with Hammerspoon. https://github.com/cweagans/dotfiles/blob/master/.hammerspoo...

(Context: I’ve only had this happen when I connect my Caldigit thunderbolt dock. This dock has always caused the audio to change balance to ~90% left since I unboxed it, so I suspect it has something to do with how the audio interface presents itself to the system, but I don’t know for sure.)

MichaelZuo|3 years ago

Do MacBook users really control their computers if something as obvious as audio sound balance can change by itself so often?

Tsarbomb|3 years ago

My bluetooth headphones will always change to left side only when reconnecting. If I accidentally walk to far from my laptop and come back, same deal.

It is absolutely wild this bug exists.

whatwhatwhat_|3 years ago

Oh shit. Today I get my second steroid injection into my left eardrum for sound loss. I’ve been testing with my mbp. FML