I own a Mac Book Pro 14 for a couple of months – and also the Air Pods Max. Sound quality, pairing, Noice cancelling and so on – worked great so far.
Today I put on my Max and the sound quality was somehow … bad… bass was somehow not really there… the music sounds like it were a couple miles away…. Connecting the Max to a phone… music sounds way better… more “powerful”.
After some research it turned out, there is a setting in MacOS where you can set which device MacOS uses for sound input…. this is under “Settings” => “Sound” => “Input”… if your sound input is set as shown below – the AirPods are highlighted – your Mac uses the Max as sound input device and this reduces sound quality tremendously… try it… you will be horrified ;-)
The proper setting for listening music is highlighting the MacBook Microphone – seconds after the strong bass is back with the Max :-)
For me as newbie in the Apple Universe… why does this have to be so complicated…. why does it even switch the setting when I use Apple Music… this is weird… why does it not automatically switch to a an appropriate setting when I turn on Apple Music ?!? Weird…
Update 2022-06-06:
This settings get’s adjusted every time I connect the Max’ … so have to manually set the Mac Microphone as input device again … annoying :-/