Audio
After working pretty well for many, many months, my external mic, a Blue Yeti, suddenly started having issues in Microsoft Teams on macOS. The issue was isolated to Teams, other video and audio solutions worked fine. For some reason, Teams had decided to start auto-adjusting the input level on its own, rendering it pretty useless. While some might say it’s a blessing that I get auto-muted, seemingly at random, but for me at least it’s pretty annoying.
My audio setup is a old NAD 326 BEE stereo amplifier with a couple of Dali Blue 5005 speakers. I also have a turntable connected to it, and it sounds beautiful. The solution for enabling streaming to an old (but awesome!) amp, was using the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ I had laying around. I added a HiFiBerry DAC+ HAT to it, and enclosed it in a nice little case that also comes from HifiBerry.
I recently got a pair of new displays for the office, a couple of lovely Dell U2719DC’s. These offer USB-C connectivity, which is really nice, and makes it easy to connect my MacBook when I’m in the office. Connected to one of the displays is a Logitech Z337 set of speakers with a sub, since there is no built-in speakers in these displays. The problem I had with that setup, is that macOS doesn’t let me easily differenciate between the two as they are named exactly the same, sometimes creating confusion as to which of them should be the sound output to the speakers.