This article explains how to fix Surface Headphones autoplaying semi-random things when you remove them from your ears and place on the desk.
And by that, I mean autoplaying even when you’ve explicitly stopped anything from playing. Or even when it first stops playing something else. It’s delightfully consistent in the most random way ever!
It’s simply funtastic that someone actually designed this user experience – I’m sure it works perfectly on a mac, and probably is great even on iPhone… But on Windows, it just leaves at least yours truly confused and annoyed.
Background
A couple of years ago, I purchased Microsoft Surface Headphones 2. They’ve been my daily driver ever since, so I’ve got some pretty good mileage out of them. But for the longest time, they’ve had an infuriating… Feature.
If you have multiple different apps on your computer capable of producing some sort of audio, the “automatic on-ear detection” feature of the headphones will helpfully start or stop playing one of these every time you remove the headphones from your ears.
And I do that quite a few times per day, as I leave my office for coffee, lunch, coffee, coffee or coffee. Plus, since I work for a Swedish company, we also have the “fika” breaks.
But that’s enough of the Nordic culture. What’s wrong with the automatic ear detection?
Well, it all started with myself being delighted to notice, that the headphones are able to pause audio when you remove them, or place them on your desk. That means that if you’re watching a YouTube video, when you remove the headphones, they’ll stop the video.
That’s very handy! However, while they stop the video, they also start another audio stream. For me, that’s usually Spotify – and they’ll just pick the latest podcast I’ve last listened to on my phone.
… do you already see the problem?
So whenever I’d return from my coffee break, I’d notice I have missed 10 minutes of the latest podcast I meant to actually listen through! Gets pretty annoying after missing big chunks of the latest episode I’ve been listening to – and even worse when Spotify then continues on to the next episode of another podcast! Whenever I’d pick up my phone, it would of course have synchronized the progress.
Anyway. I am smart, I know how to adapt. I began to stop listening to anything on my computer before I’d leave. That way I can’t use the automation, but I won’t be losing any episodes either.
However, the headphones are much smarter than me: whenever there would be NO audio, the headphones will start the latest audio again, when put on the desk. I assume this is to ensure that my empty office gets to enjoy whatever tech tutorial I’m watching on YouTube while I’m gone.
Great feature! This way, I will still lose whatever I was watching on YouTube but at least Spotify won’t be affected.
At this point, I decided I can’t beat the demon within these headphones, and started to turn them off whenever I left my office for coffee, for a walk, or even to walk more than a few meters from my laptop (because that’s the range that Bluetooth on these headphones has).
That stopped the autoplay – and I guess it would’ve been surprising if it didn’t – but of course meant that whenever I came back to my pc after a break, it would take Teams and Spotify a few minutes to recognize the headphones again. And in the meantime, you can’t call anyone on Teams, nobody can call you, music will play randomly from some other speakers or maybe not at all.
Problem
First of all, I’d like to underline that your headphones are working correctly, your Windows is working in its normal fashion (i.e. bad, but it isn’t at fault here), you can’t blame Spotify on this, and you’re not going mad. As mad as this sounds, this IS the expected User Experience®️.
This is a poorly thought-out feature that can not be disabled.
You bought smart headphones with dumb features that can’t be disabled – that is 100% on you, and you need to change, not the product.
Shame on you for even thinking otherwise. You dumb, headphone smart.
Anyway – after accepting the demon that these headphones are, I lived happily with them for multiple months before getting sick of not being able to “just jump on a call” (because my headphones took forever to reconnect), and decided to do something about it!
And that started with googling binging.
Solution
The main problem is that there is no way to disable this feature. So we’ll need to find another way to fix this.
Luckily, such a solution DOES exist.
If you remove the ear cushion (or whatever it’s called), you’ll see something like this:
And adding a bit of aluminum (pronounced “aluminum” for you language nerds out there) foil tape on the part shown below, should disable the annoying ear sensor.
Adding the foil on just one side should be enough – as long as the earphones think, that they’re on at least ONE of your two ears, they should not try to do anything too smart.
At least that’s what people online were saying. It didn’t do jack for me.
So like a long-term Windows user, I decided to do the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.
Because like any long-term Windows user will know, that’s how you solve issues in the Microsoft-sphere.
And it DID work.
Behold – this is how you disable the presence/proximity/on-ear sensor on Microsoft Surface Headphones 2:
I didn’t care enough to actually figure out where exactly the sensor is located. My aluminum foil was apparently thin enough that adding just 1-2 layers was not enough. After adding about 6 layers the sensor stopped working – which is precisely what I was trying to do.
So – problem solved!
Final words (and the next steps)
About a week after finally fixing the ridiculous ear detection feature, the headphones snapped in half. So much so for that, then.
I guess 2-3 years is not the worst lifetime for headphones, but I can’t say I’d be very satisfied with it either.
Actually, I feel kind of ridiculous finishing this article now. I’m writing about an unholy physical fix to a dumb issue in old hardware that I don’t actually own anymore.
References
- A fantastic thread on Reddit:
- Other people don’t like it either:
- Microsoft confirms it’s a dumb feature that cannot be turned off:
He's been a developer from 2004 (starting with PHP and Java), and he's been working on .NET projects, Azure, Office 365, SharePoint and a lot of other stuff. He's also Microsoft MVP for Azure.
This is his personal professional (e.g. professional, but definitely personal) blog.
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