Brand new Macbook Air volume gets very low until reboot.

i have seen this question coming up many times over the years through searching and no solid responses. I have a brand new Macbook Air 13inch M3, running Sonoma 14.5

the sound settings were the first thing i checked, there are no external devices connected to it.

at present, the sound level is about 50% or less of "normal". everything it turned up to 100%. i have tried restarting the process by entering "sudo killall coreaudiod" into terminal and that fixes things... for a fraction of a second.

this is about my 5th mac and have never seen this before. IIRC, i had my bluetooth earbuds connected the first time i noticed it. and it was the same there and on the macbook speakers. log out and back in OR restart the computer and all is good.

hoping somebody has an idea about this.

thanks.

Well, i am solving my own question ten mins after i asked it.

Seems that when i was listening to audio and then started using Teamviewer... that takes over the audio drivers in some fashion and the audio got really low. As soon as i fully closed the application, audio went back to normal.

As a hint, the microphone was showing as in use on the task bar... so that might help finding whatever has affected overall audio levels.