Bluetooth audio problems Catalina

I have the same. I connect to a Pioneer Bluetooth stereo system, and stream Internet radio throughout the day, and yes, 3 or 4 times a day, completely at random when not even doing anything on the Mac, it simply drops back to the Mac's speakers.

The Bluetooth icon hasn't changed, it's still connected to the stereo, everything is up and running, but I have to manually go back to the BT icon and disconnect/reconnect the external device.

I haven't had the patience to leave it alone when it does this to see whether it spontaneously reconnects to the external speaker system - I expect it does (because I sometimes leave my desk for half the day and it's always connected when I return), but I can imagine how frustrating it is when you'r using headphones.

I have several pairs of bluetooth headphones & they all keep disconnecting once I upgraded to Catalina. Can anyone tell me if I can just backup my system settings on Catalina and downgrade to Mojave? Catalina has been a total mess including the removal of 32 bit support. Not a good OS . Jobs would be rolling in his grave.

I have a MacBook Air (Early 2013) and I have a Creative D80 that I always use when I'm home. Recently I upgraded to Catalina and now I'm have problems with it. The audio skips and drops out. I've rebooted the machine, I deleted com.apple.Bluetooth.plist and cleared the NVRam with option/command/p/r, I've re-added the Creative D80 and nothing helps. I really miss my D80 as it sounds much better than the built in speakers.

If someone has a solution or even a way to commit to further diagnosis I'd like to hear it

I have the same issue also.

Whatever BlueTooth headphones/earbuds/speaker that I have attached randomly drops to no output after 10-15 minutes of use. The bluetooth icon still shows the device as being connected, but there is no audio. I also cannot disconnect from the device from the bt menubar icon.

removing and reconnecting the device from bt systemn prefs seems to work - for another 10-15 minutes and then it happens all over again.

Same issue happening with a Jabra 75 UC and a Plantronics Legend on a 2017 13 inch MacBook Pro after upgrading to Catalina. I'm running 10.15.1

If I'm on a VOIP call over Zoom or Hangouts the audio drops out within a matter of minutes. The same headsets work flawlessly on my phone and Windows machine.

I've tried all of the resetting tricks and PRAM/SMC clears.

This is super annoying and I'm surprised something this wasn't caught during QA. It only appears to affect Bluetooth audio because my mouse and keyboard seem to work normally.

Use the Activity Monitor and Console apps to look for strange behavior. Activity Monitor will tell you if anything is using excessive CPU time. It will graph the overall CPU usage which should point out times of high CPU utilization. The Activity Monitor can also show you the processes using the most CPU. On my system, I had four mystery background processes using 100% of a processor each. After updating Parallels, these mysterious processes went away on the next reboot. Even if you can't resolve the problem this way, identifying troublesome processes will allow more useful information.

If you look at the System log using Console, you may be able to spot error messages. Look for the words audio and bluetooth.

The more information that you can provide, the faster the problem will be resolved.

If you want something really odd, my laptop says that it is connected to the internet through my iPhone, but my iPhone says that it isn't connected to the internet. I think the near simultaneous introduction of Catalina and iOS 13 may be making the problem worse.

Same issue here. MBP 2017 using Sennheiser BT headphones. I contacted Apple support and they told me to go through all the usual troubleshooting BS (system health check, safe mode, create new user account) despite my pointing out that there are many many threads on their own forums raising this issue. Useless.

Just completed an update to macOS Catalina and it's now working. In which case, for my situation, it may come down to a combination of firmware update and macOS update to resolve it for the Bose headset.

As has been said numerous times on this thread - NVRAM reset + bluetooth pref delete + blutooth debug + disconnecting/unpairing & every other trick here does NOT work. I repeat this is a bug in MacOS Catalina. None of the solutions in this thread will work. You can only downgrade to Mojave, and/or contact Apple who will takes months to fix this.

I tried the NVRAM reset before I posted, no joy. I also found a bluetooth scanner and I can see that the bluetooth signal from my MacBook Air is about -64 which is very, very good, so it's not like my signal is weak.

As has been said numerous times on this thread - NVRAM reset + bluetooth pref delete + blutooth debug + disconnecting/unpairing & every other trick here does NOT work. I repeat this is a bug in MacOS Catalina. None of the solutions in this thread will work. You can only downgrade to Mojave, and/or contact Apple who will takes months to fix this.

Same problem here: 10.15.1, MBP 2017, new airpods, beatsx, bose soundlink 2, magic mouse.

Every 20-30 mins bluetooth audio devices get disconnected and once couple of days mouse too. On Mojave there were no problems.