Hi Guys!

I am running a software-updated 11-inch, Mid 2011 MacBook Air and using my Big Jambox. For reference I am a Unix system programmer and developer with 25 years of experience, so if you want to talk to me using quite long technical words, I am very happy.

Long story short: I have paired and re-paired, software updated, and connected-via-USB-and-wiped-all-the-pairings-and-again-paired my Big Jambox with my Macbook Air, and yet STILL it refuses to play sound from my Mac whilst the Sound Preferences are set to STEREO “Bluetooth Headphones” (my emphasis) – but it is really well behaved and plays well as non-stereo Bluetooth Headphones… except it just sounds like crap.

So, to recap:

1) I go to System Preferences > Sound, while paired.

2) If I select “Alec M Jambox .. Bluetooth Headphones” => okay but low rez mono audio

3) If I select “Alec M Jambox Stereo .. Bluetooth Headphones” => does not work at all, no audio, silence. Makes a depressing “bloop” noise when I select it, then silence. Selecting back to non-stereo and it start playing again immediately.

Syslog says this when I switch it to Stereo mode:

Sep 13 21:11:06 mistral.local coreaudiod[147] : Enabled automatic stack shots because audio IO is inactive
Sep 13 21:11:06 mistral kernel[0] : REQUIRE_NO_ERR_GOTO_ACTION failure: 0xe00002c0 – file: /SourceCache/IOBluetoothFamily_kexts/IOBluetoothFamily-4140.4.2/Core/Family/Drivers/IOBluetoothSCOAudioDriver/IOBluetoothSCOAudioEngine.cpp:550
— last message repeated 1 time —
Sep 13 21:11:08 mistral.local coreaudiod[147] : Disabled automatic stack shots because audio IO is active

…at which point it goes silent. When I switch it back to mono audio playback I get this:

Sep 13 21:11:59 mistral.local coreaudiod[147] : Enabled automatic stack shots because audio IO is inactive
Sep 13 21:11:59 mistral.local coreaudiod[147] : Disabled automatic stack shots because audio IO is active
Sep 13 21:11:59 mistral kernel[0] : [AppleBluetoothHCIControllerUSBTransport][HandleIsochData] — Error: 0xE000400F (kIOUSBMessagePortWasNotSuspended)
Sep 13 21:11:59 mistral kernel[0] : E:[AppleBluetoothHCIControllerUSBTransport][AppleBluetoothHCIControllerUSBTransport::HandleIsochData] error 0xe000400f (kIOUSBMessagePortWasNotSuspended) — Isoch In pipe

….and then it springs into lo-fi life.

It’s deeply vexing not to be able to use the Big Jambox over bluetooth properly. I am, I repeat, running the latest 10.8 OSX patches, and have run Disk Utility permissions-checking to ensure nothing is untoward in /dev. Looks like a driver issue to me.

Any idea how I can fix this, please?