Reply To: AirPods Pro 2 Spatial Audio volume drops softly whenever MacBook notification chimes

Diagnosis: APFS snapshot rollback or First Aid is irrelevant here—the symptom is a live bluetoothd/coreaudiod IPC race condition, not filesystem corruption. Verify the active Handoff policy persists across reboots by checking defaults -currentHost read com.apple.Bluetooth AudioSwitchBehavior (expect 0 for manual); if it reverts, inspect ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.Bluetooth.*.plist for write failures via log show --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.bluetooth"' --last 1h. Time Machine restores only reintroduce the stale preference plist causing the race.