Bluetooth Headphones sound terrible on Mac OS X?

I got a pair of Plantronics bluetooth headphones. Work great with my iPhone. Sounds terrible with my Mac, cuts out, sounds choppy, sounds mono to me. A co-worker tells me he has the same problem.

BTW, I'm on Leopard, patched up.

So question is: What is the deal? Is it fixable?

In case anyone ends up here, like me, experiencing this problem on a more recent Mac OS (in my case Sierra): None of the other solutions here worked for me. Sierra doesn't give the option to connect in headset or headphones mode, and the bitpool setting made no difference.

I finally figured it out: Going to sound preferences and manually changing the sound input device back to Internal Microphone seemed to switch my headset into headphone mode, making the sound quality worlds better.

Note that you can also do this faster by option-clicking on the volume icon in the menu bar.

Hope that helps someone out there.

Make sure that when you pair the headset you select "use as wireless headphones" (or similar) instead of "use as headset". The headset profile was designed for phone calls, and you should only use it if you're pairing a headset that does not support A2DP.

Your Plantronics headset probably supports both (if it has a microphone) because some devices switch between the two profiles for music-listening and call-taking.

I have a Motorola A2DP headset and on occasion with it pairs in headset mode with my MacBookPro it's very staticy and the sound is sub-par. Usually, by disabling bluetooth and then turning it back on and resyncing everything it works fine again.

It's pretty rare that it ends up with bad sound, but I get the feeling that Apple has pretty crappy bluetooth drivers.

Try the method explained by Casey Liss in this post at Casey's Tumblelog.  It tweaks the bitpool setting which makes all the difference in the world.

UPDATE:

The above blog post points to an article on Scott Dier's blog that no longer exists.  However, it can be found on The Wayback Machine here, and it says:

OSX, Snow Leopard, a2dp

So you'd figure with Snow Leopard that sound quality with some a2dp headsets would be better — turns out it isn't.  I was able to 'fix' my sound quality with a Motorola S9 by going to Bluetooth Explorer (option-click on bluetooth to find it) and going into Utilities->Special Options.  I changed the bitpool minimum to 40 and the sound quality is MUCH better.  Sounds like its a problem with negotiation between this headset and OS X.  If you set the value too high OS X will let you know that the headset rejected the codec settings.  I'd figure that 40 is ok for me, but might not be ok for others — use this at your own risk.

Posted by Scott Dier at 11:39 AM (Wednesday, October 7, 2009)