I purchased a pair of H9i which I received on Friday. I also have H6 (2nd gen) that I love. Fortunately H9i have very similar sound signature to H6 while also adding the benefit of wireless and NC. However I have some real problems with them falling back to SBC instead of AAC on my Mac. I contacted the support and they gave me some recommendations, including unpairing and resetting the headphones, then pairing them again, as well as executing a terminal command that would force the Mac to establish AAC codec rather than SBC and while that works after a Mac restart, it switches back to SBC if I power off/on the headphones and the only solution is to reboot the Mac again. I haven't received an answer from the support yet and they have escalated the issue to their engineers but I was wondering whether other people on Mac can confirm that. Here are the steps that I also sent to the tech support:
MacBook Pro 15-inch (with touch bar, 2016), macOS High Sierra 10.13.6
iTunes 12.8.0.150
H9i, serial 29845199, firmware 5.0.4
iOS app installed on iPhone X, iOS 11.4.1
The headphones are connected via Bluetooth to both the Mac and the iPhone
The following command is executed in the Mac terminal: sudo defaults write bluetoothaudiod "Enable AAC codec" -bool true
1. Reboot the Mac
2. Start listening to streaming music from Apple Music on iTunes on the Mac
3. Option-click the bluetooth icon in the menu bar, select the H9i and expand it
Result: audio codec is AAC as expected
4. Pause the music.
5. Leave the headphones on your head.
6. Turn the headphones off (headphones should always stay on the head for the rest of the steps)
7. Wait until noise canceling disappears and external noises are heard
8. Turn the headphones on
9. Wait until they automatically reconnect to the Mac
10. Start playing the music again
11. Repeat step 3 (Option-click the bluetooth icon, etc.)
Result1: audio codec is now SBC and the audio quality has degraded
Result2: the music stops after a few seconds and might start again and stop intermittently
Result3: when the music stops by itself remove the headphones from your head and you will hear the music starts although the headphones are not on your head
Can anyone confirm that happens with their H9i. I really like them when they work as expected, however the switch to SBC is unacceptable since it's audibly worse and the intermittent audio pauses and Bluetooth problems as a whole are a no go for me and I am pretty positive I will return them. However it might be just my pair. I don't like any other wireless/NC headphones and I would have loved to keep the H9i
If that's a global problem with H9i then I will simply keep on using my H6 which work like a charm.