IOS – How to restore the audio balance to default

I would start with a new user - if you felt it was easier to start there - you could always make one good back up, delete both users (keeping a third one for admin purposes) and migrate in your wife's account from the backup. You could make a new account for you and then copy in the files you want quite easily from the backup.

Most things you need are Documents, Music, Pictures so it's trivial to copy them back from a backup.

It's nicer to do this rather than go mucking among all the preference files unless you want to learn that end of things.

Turns out I had some strange Core Audio driver issue. Every time Skype was running, process "coreaudiod" would fire up and begin to hog CPU like crazy. I fixed permissions on my boot volume and it fixed a bunch of stuff related to iTunes, which apparently also fixed whatever was going on.

Once the coreaudiod issue was resolved, here's the setup that is working perfectly:

1. Skype "microphone" (input) set to Soundflower (2ch)
2. Aggregate Device created, consisting of Built-In Microphone and Soundflower (2 ch.)
3. Reason set to use the Aggregate Device
4. SoundflowerBed set to output to Balance.

Now all I have to do is create an audio track and enable monitoring, and I can hear myself in the mic, while normal Reason audio flows out both to Skype and my Balance to my headphones, and all is well with the world.