Mac OS X Bluetooth A2DP Sound Quality

Have you bought a pair of bluetooth stereo headphones and paired them up to your Mac?

Have you noticed that they sound crappy and tinny?

There’s a reason!

Turns out that the default minimum quality in OS X is pretty low. I guess the OS and the bluetooth device negotiate this, and if the device doesn’t provide anything (because it’s say a cheap bluetooth adaptor you got from china), it defaults to the minimum. The minimum is a bad thing mkay?

So let’s change it.

If you have the developer tools installed, you can use Bluetooth Explorer to change the minimum bit pool by going into the special options item in the utilities menu. But there’s an easier way.

Simply open up the terminal and paste this in there:

defaults write com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent “Apple Bitpool Min (editable)” 58

Once that’s done, restart your machine

58 might be a little high, and from what I’ve read, people have had success from 40 up. But 58 is working great for me.

Now get back to enjoying your tunes in a wireless fashion.

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