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I've been having a very annoying problem with my Beyerdynamic Amiron Wireless headphones for a couple of years now and I'm wondering if anyone else has had such issues. Say I'm listening to music through the Spotify desktop client and I pause the music there and go to watch a video on Youtube. I expect to hear the video from the headphones, but I won't, because somehow the headphones think there is no audio signal. Once I unpause Spotify, I can hear both the music and the browser but pausing the music will again mute the browser. The browser is in fact playing the content with audio and is not muted, but the headphones are somehow locked to Spotify. So the only solution would be to either kill Spotify, or set it to play but mute it so that I can only hear Youtube (which is what I usually do because opening and closing it is too sluggish). If I choose to close Spotify, sometimes the headphones still won't play anything until I pause/unpause from the second application.

This tends to happen with any pair of applications that both play audio and I'm not sure if it's an OS X bug or related to the headphone's firmware. The same does not happen with Apple's own AirPods but I don't have access to another non-Apple pair of wireless headphones to test. It also doesn't happen when connecting the same set of wireless headphones (or any other) through the 3.5mm jack or while using the speakers.

Has anyone experienced similar issues, with these particular model or another wireless headphone and if there is a fix?

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2 Answers 2

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EDIT: I updated the firmware and the issue is gone, thank god.

Old answer:

OK! I figured out what is going on. The Amiron Wireless firmware seems to turn off the headphone when the media state is paused which is caused by the HardwareMediaKeyHandling on any host app. You can inspect this phenomenon when you have a touch bar with media keys, as you can see the playing and paused states as you start and stop audio sources like YouTube videos or Spotify tracks.

Let's say you have two YouTube videos played, your media state is playing. If you pause one video the state will switch to paused despite the fact that another YouTube video is still playing. The same happens on Spotify and any other app. As soon as you switch to another app that leverages the HardwareMediaKeyHandling and pause the audio there, the media state will switched to paused, because HardwareMediaKeyHandling only supports one application tangled at the same time. Your YouTube videos are still playing, but the state is paused. It's not a well-thought design by Apple. The HardwareMediaKeyHandling can only be tied to one app at the same time.

The Amiron Wireless headset output seems to be tied to the media key state very strict, thus the headset stops its output as soon as the media key state switches to pause and only starts when it goes back into playing. I don't know why Beyerdynamics decided to silent the headset when the media state switches to pause, maybe to spare battery, but it's a terrible decision. My temporary fix always was to stop and restart the not working audio source. Now it makes sense why this worked, because the media state was switched from paused to playing in that process and the headset would pass-through audio again.

So what is the fix? Simply disable HardwareMediaKeyHandling in all the applications that have audio sources, although it will mean that the hardware media keys will not work anymore, which is a shame.

In Chrome, I would go to chrome://flags/#hardware-media-key-handling and set it to disable. Now I can pause a video without stopping audio output. For Spotify, there is no way to do it, yet.

EDIT: Re-reading your question, it seems that you already did that, or you could revive your headset by pressing play on a YouTube video. After disabling HardwareMediaKeyHandling my state is the very same to yours. You could enable HardwareMediaKeyHandling to have the ability to revive your headset on YouTube without killing or muting Spotify. It's no solution for me though. I'm after disabling HardwareMediaKeyHandling system-wide to get rid of this problem altogether at this point.

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Heyho i have the same problem with the same Headset.

I found this in a Spotify forum:

There is a fix everyone!

Just go to Edit -> preferences -< Display options and disable "Show desktop overlay when using media keys"

This fixed my issue atleast

For me it did not help...even worse... i'm more confused. After disable this Options the browser works, but the Ingam-Spund mutes.

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