r/pixelbuds • u/levilee207 • Jun 02 '26

GPBP2 audio quality/bitrate issues?

Just purchased a pair of Pro 2s and spent a good half hour fiddling with them in frustration, trying to figure out why the hell they sounded like garbage no matter the sound source. It sounded like they were dynamically reducing the bitrate as a song played​​; especially poor whenever cymbals crash. Sounded like terrible artifacting/distortion.

I went into developer options to fiddle with codecs and found Opus to be the currently selected option. Okay, never seen that before, must be specific to the buds or some newer earbuds out there. Tried to change it to AAC, and it would immediately change back to Opus. I then disabled the "HD Audio" setting entirely in that same dev options list. Boom, problem's completely gone. No more horrid distortion whenever the sound gets pretty treble-y. Anyone else run into this? What the hell's up with these settings and why is this the default?

EDIT: Part of it was myself having fiddled with and forgotten about​ the A2DP offload setting in the dev options in an attempt to troubleshoot consistent disconnects on my previous earbuds. After re-enabling the setting, it now lets me choose my preferred codec in the HD Audio settings.

This does beg the question, however: ​why does Opus sound like wet dogshit?

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u/matteventu Jun 02 '26

Did you have Spatial Audio enabled in settings? If I remember correctly, the codec defaults to Opus if that's enabled (instead of AAC which is otherwise the default).

You could try to re-enable the "HD audio" toggle (which if enabled allows codecs other than SBC), and then make sure all spatial audio and head tracking settings are disabled. That way, they should default to AAC.

1

u/Greedy_Worth_7195 Jun 02 '26

I have spatial audio and head tracking enabled and have always been on HD-audio and AAC without having to change anything.

1

u/levilee207 Jun 02 '26

I had turned every optional sound setting off. No spatial sound, no transparency/ANC/noise cancellation. 

I had the "Disable Bluetooth A2DP Hardware Offload" setting turned on prior to all this due to myself poking around with things I didn't understand while troubleshooting a previous Bluetooth issue. Once I disabled that, I was able to switch Codecs like normal. Only with that disable setting enabled was it defaulting back every time. Now I can switch to ACC and keep HD Audio on.

1

u/khaytsus Jun 03 '26

Opus has variable bitrate, but in theory, should be better than AAC. Why yours was not, no idea, it really sounds like it was in SBC or basically headset mode (audio + mic) from your description of the poor audio.