Fenix 7x music quality really awful

Exactly the same here.

Sounds like a 56kbit stream - high frequency's are completely distorted.

Garmin, please increase the stream quality. Everyone knows, that listening music will impact the battery. So don't try to safe some energy - the music feature is not practical usable. at the moment it's just for advertising...

Could it be related to the voice prompts? Perhaps there is a bottleneck there. Those who do not notice distortion in the music can check if they activated the voice prompts or what language did they activate them?

No voice prompts since this is also happening when you just listen music on your watch not only during an activity

Bad sound quality here as well with Samsung buds 2 and Fenix 7x. Was way better on fenix 6

Why hasn’t this issue been resolved yet? It was brought to Garmin’s attention 3 weeks ago. It’s a pretty big deal, unless you have really low standards music is unlistenable because of the distorted treble. On-board music support is one of the main reasons why people upgrade their running watch. If it’s a hardware issue then there needs to be a product re-call for all affected units.

Maybe they wait for the return window (30 days in eu) to pass and then tell us is not fixable or not considered a problem or switch permanently to mono to solve. If this is HW problem I do not expect them to acknowledge anything.

Right,  after 3 weeks we as customers spent much money should have some update of status at least. 

Yes, there are also other issues users experiencing...with display flashlight not working properly if gestures light are enabled...or smart notification are showing always for all...either way if only calls notifications are enabled. This music issues....to be honest I also expected more from Garmin for such high prices. I hope they will be able to fix in software update...fingress crossed.

Hi, I am no owner of an Epix 2 or Fenix 7, but it sounds like a data rate problem if the sound is better with mono files. Maybe the audio data rate via bluetooth was limited to enable concurrent connections with the phone as well as BT and ANT+ training gear. It seems not all of those having sound problems have external gear connected, but also not all have perceived sound problems anyway.

It is possible that the different headsets compared here use different codecs, and the worst, most basic codec (SBC) needs more data to sound as good as better codecs (aptX etc), which sound good with less data. This, btw, has nothing to do with the compression of the audio file itself, but with the wireless transmission.

Perhaps there also are different BT chipsets involved, although the problem does not seem split along the BT/Wifi- or BT-only chipsets. Once again, though, it seems hard for me to understand how this kind of issue could have been missed in alpha testing.