Songs in the Music app will suddenly sound muffled in the middle of playing. Clicking progress bar resets sounds.

Been doing more testing after my Mac finally updated to macOS Monterey 12.3 (that was requested by Apple's Senior Tech). This morning, after a fresh restart, I started listening to music. Almost one hour after starting (13 songs), it finally happened within the last minute of a David Bowie song. All songs were streaming.

Then I downloaded all the songs in a particular playlist I have and have been listening to these for over an hour now (16 songs so far) and the issue hasn't happened and that's with the memory pretty full too (currently 230MB available of 16GB).

Just happened another 2 songs after. I let it play while muffled while trying to change some settings. Couldn't get all the settings I wanted to try but here's what I think I learned:

• Crossfade on/off had no effect.
• Sound Enhancer on/off had no effect (on the muffling that is, the sound changed but was muffled still on both settings).
• Sound Check was ON, when I turned it OFF oaths particular song (Take the Money and Run by Steve Miller Band), the song got much louder and I had a hard time telling if it was muffled. When I turned Sound Check back ON to compare, the streaming restarted (paused though).

That made me think maybe Sound Check was the culprit so I turned it off and kept playing music.

The very next song started playing nicely (Love Me Two Times (Mono) by The Doors), but with about 45 seconds left (and Sound Check OFF), the sound became very muffled!

This doesn't usually happen THAT often as I said in my post originally. I can usually listen for a little while without this muffling happening. Today however, for whatever reason, it has happened in 4 of the last 7 songs I was listening to. This is becoming unbearable.

This has been escalated to Apple's engineering team. They had me install a special diagnostic app and had it run for a little over 24hrs while I used my computer as normal. The issue happened a handful of times (happened through the USB DAC connected to the powered speakers and the Mac mini M1 connected directly to the powered speakers with a 3.5mm/RCA cable). This issue did not happen after over 1hr15min of listening with my Apple AirPods Pro.

They gathered diagnostics and are reviewing the information.

Little update and correction. It definitely doesn't happen only once. I just had it happen twice, a few songs apart (all streaming). Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap from AC/DC had that muffling happen with about 50 seconds left in the song. Then 2 other songs streamed just fine and it happened again with about a minute left on Brother John from Blues Traveler. I don't think it's song specific (or file specific) but it can't hurt to share all the info I guess.

Again, play/pause didn't fix it, but clicking the progress bar did.

FYI, currently in contact with Apple Support.

A few more tests: I loaded up the memory on my computer with a couple heavy apps opened (less than 200MB of free memory) and listened to one long song that has failed this morning (Brother John). I could see the progress bar load up the streaming but the song never got muffled.

Next I'll try listening to just songs on my computer to see if this happens again, however that will take some time. In the

meantime, the "normal" Apple Support is stumped and is bumping this issue up to their "Senior support specialists."

I paused that last song in which it happened and started filming. You can't really tell that it's muffled but you can tell that the sound changes. Video is attached: https://youtu.be/hO-Cw1uMl44