Google's flagship Pixel smartphones suffer from crippling audio issues; software to blame

Google’s flagship Pixel and Pixel XL devices appear to be suffering from static distortion issues with its speakers. Reports of this issue initially popped up in late October. Mark Buckman noticed the issue on his Pixel XL and contacted Google. He claims that Google immediately issued him a replacement, and not once, but three times. His fourth Pixel XL as well as his wife’s Pixel are both still suffering from the same issue. As Buckman demonstrates here, the speakers on the phone start distorting at high volumes. His phone is running Android 7.1.1 at the time of the test.

When the same audio track is played at full volume on a Nexus 6, there’s no distortion. Frustrated with the issue, Buckman also set up a poll where he asked users to vote. At the time we checked, almost 70 percent of the 503 people who voted reported the same audio issues. Android Authority did speculate that this was a hardware issue, which would mean a major headache for Google. However, a software fix doing the rounds indicates that this is just a software bug in the Pixel’s Android ROM. Google should be able to fix this with an update. The unofficial patch is available here and essentially replaces the Pixel’s audio driver with a custom one. As you can see below, the difference between the stock ROM and the modded one is night and day.

Google is yet to acknowledge the error or issue a fix.