iOS’ Headphone Safety May Be Overriding Volume Memory for Your Third-Party Bluetooth Headphones
For a long time, I was very skeptical of wireless earbuds. They’re far more expensive than the wired kind;1 you have to keep them charged; the batteries will eventually wear out, and typically can’t be replaced; and it’s much easier to lose one wireless earbud than it is to lose a wired pair.
Earlier this year, I ended up with a free-to-me, clearly rather low-end set of no-name wireless earbuds. They were, sadly, not worth using: there was a persistent, high-pitched electronic whine audible in the background, and the case held the earbuds loosely enough that they would wake up in my bag and steal Bluetooth audio away from my car stereo while I was driving. However, my partner has a much nicer pair — JBL’s Tune 230NC — so I knew these problems were not intrinsic to the category; and my cheap-o earbuds were just barely good enough for me to finally appreciate the upsides. So, with some fortuitous timing, I picked up a slightly-even-nicer model of JBL earbuds — the Live Pro 2 — on sale for $100 USD.
It’s no exaggeration to say that these have been transformative for me. For one thing, sitting in a semi-open-plan office space, the noise canceling makes a huge difference for online meetings. But more than that, I’ve realized that the wired earbuds I had been using were a significant factor in why I’d all but stopped listening to music over the course of the past decade. Granted, it wasn’t strictly an issue of the wire — mine were the kind that used to come free with iPhones, which sounded fine, but they were never very comfortable for me and they were hard to use in noisy places. Nonetheless, the wire is constraining: plugged into my phone while moving about/doing chores, it gets in the way and tugs at the earbuds; plugged into my computer for a meeting, it tethers my head in a way that feels claustrophobic after a while. Without the wire, I can almost forget that I’m even wearing the things.
I have had a few complaints, but they’ve all been fairly minor and are easy to overlook2 — except one: every time my earbuds connected to my phone, my phone’s media volume automatically jumped to 50%, even though it most certainly wasn’t at 50% the last time I used them. That still might not be a big deal, except that with these headphones, 50% volume is deafening.
Knowing that iOS normally remembers the last-used volume level for each playback device, I assumed this must have been a “feature” of the earbuds themselves. I searched in vain for any setting to disable it; I searched in vain even for any mention of such a feature, though I did encounter plenty of people posting about similar problems.
As I sat down to write this article, it was supposed to be about how I waded into the iOS Shortcuts app for (approximately) the first time; about how I built a shortcut that sets the media volume to the minimum audible level, and made it trigger when my earbuds connect; about how I cleverly included a three-second delay, ensuring my volume setting would take effect after the jump to 50% but still before I would have had a chance to start playing something.
But, for better or worse, I am incredibly paranoid about being wrong on the Internet; so, as I sat down to write this article, I once again scoured the Web for any definitive reference I could link to about this reset-to-50% behavior. And, this time, I found something I had missed before.
Several people on Reddit mentioned iOS’ Headphone Safety feature, which is located under Settings → Sounds & Haptics, at the bottom of the list (as of 26.1; I think it was in the same place before then, but I’m not certain). Mostly, they said to make sure “Reduce Loud Audio” was turned on, and set to an appropriate decibel level. In theory, this might make 50% volume less deafening, though it wouldn’t solve the underlying not-remembering-the-last-used-volume problem.
A few people, though, mentioned something counterintuitive: they said to turn off “Reduce Loud Audio.” Which I did; and, just to be sure, I also turned off “Reduce Loud Sounds” on the Sounds & Haptics page itself, outside the Headphone Safety section. And, lo and behold: the next time I connected my earbuds… well, that time the volume went to 50% again, as it had before. But then I set it to a lower level, and played something for a moment,3 and put my earbuds away; and the next time I connected them, the volume stayed where I had left it.
I dis- and re-connected my earbuds a few times, and each time the volume stayed at my lower setting. Then I turned “Reduce Loud Audio” back on, and connected my earbuds, and yes — the volume jumped to 50%.
So, there you have it: if you have third-party Bluetooth headphones, and iOS steadfastly refuses to remember your preferred volume level when they’re connected, try turning off “Reduce Loud Audio” in the Headphone Safety settings.
Footnotes
Well, that was my perception, anyway. These days, you can actually get a decent pair wireless earbuds for $40 – 70 USD; and to my surprise, it turns out there do exist wired earbuds that go for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. (Okay, maybe I’m not that surprised, given what I’ve seen of audiophile culture.) ↩︎
One: although they support connecting to both my phone and another device simultaneously, there’s a bit of a ritual I have to follow to make this feel seamless. It’s the kind of thing that becomes second nature after a while, though, so it doesn’t really bother me.
Two: at first, I would very occasionally experience the audio cutting out for a second. I suspected the “removed from ear” detection was triggering when it shouldn’t have; so I disabled that feature, and that seems to have resolved it. I hardly used this anyway — it feels more natural to me to pause manually by tapping the right earbud before removing it.
Three: JBL’s iOS app allows you to customize, to a limited degree, which actions are performed by taps on each side. I have the left earbud set up to toggle noise canceling. During a call or meeting, however, both earbuds switch unilaterally to call controls (mute, unmute, end call). Consequently, if I receive a call while noise canceling is off, or if I forget to turn it on before joining a meeting, I have to go through the app if I want to switch — which isn’t hard to do, but it’s much less convenient. ↩︎
Be sure not to skip this step. I believe iOS only saves the last volume level at which something was actually played. If you change the volume and don’t play anything before disconnecting your headphones, it doesn’t count. ↩︎