bluetoothheadphonesmacos
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?
I bought a USB based Bluetooth 4.0 device: Plugable USB-BT4LE
I use Windows 7 Enterprise.
I also had your problem, only with a generic set of Bluetooth headphones. This set of headphones does not have a microphone. The Windows Bluetooth utility decided that it had one, anyway.
It became apparent that either the Broadcom drivers, or the Windows Bluetooth management subsystem were forcing the headphones into some sort of fallback, low-quality mode.
To fix it here is what I had to do:
Windows does not connect with the "best" profile. It connects using whatever you have specified or whatever is first available.
You can specifically set what profiles Windows uses on what device in the Bluetooth settings for that device. How you do that depends on what version of Windows and what Bluetooth stack & software you use. I don't have a Windows 10 machine with me right now so cannot take screenshots on one but the process is vaguely similar.
For example with an Intel Bluetooth driver and default stack under Windows 7, right clicking on the device in Devices and Printers allows you to select what to connect with:
Alternatively, right clicking and selecting Properties allows you to disable or deselect individual profiles and services:
Best Answer
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.