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Music/audio over Bluetooth highly unstable

Yoghem
1 month ago

Hi!

Yesterday I received a new FR 265. One of the main reasons for replacing my old watch was because I did not want to bring my phone on runs anymore, but still wanted to listen to music while running. This morning I made my first run with the watch, and was a bit shocked by the instability of the music playback. I was playing music through the Spotify app, (listening on my Sony WH-1000XM4 headphones) and there were just constant stutters/interruptions in the audio, both in the music and in the voice guide. I have tried rebooting the watch, rebooting the headphones, reconnecting the headphones and changing the codec settings in the Sony app, all to no avail.

Does anyone know what I can try to do to mitigate this issue? If it was only a bit of stutter I would be able to live with it, but in this state music is simply unlistenable, and I would (sadly) have to consider returning the watch.

Thanks a lot in advance!

  • 0 1 month ago

    Update: I've tried a couple more things to narrow down the issue, and I've found the following:

    1) There is no difference between using the Spotify app or the native music app.

    2) There is no difference when using audio of differing qualities: I exported a lossless audio file (flac) as lossless wav, and as mp3 with differing bitrates (320/260/210/185 kbps). There was zero difference between any of them (which should say something, as the difference in necessary transfer rate over BT between lossless wav and 185 kbps is almost tenfold).

    3) The issue is near-absent to fully absent when the watch is not being worn.

    4) The issue becomes increasingly worse the more I turn the right earcup of the headphones away from the watch.

    All in all this confuses me very much, because if it is simply mechanical interference (point 3 & 4), you would expect there to be much more stuttering in the lossless audio compared to the 185 kbps - but there simply is no difference between these. Moreover, I find it hard to believe that a device as recent and expensive as this would fail this badly at sending data over BT through just the tiniest bit of interference (i.e., my body), while my 6-year-old phone is able to do so flawlessly through multiple walls.

    It would be great if someone could weigh in on whether they do (or do not) experience this issue, and whether I might just have a faulty unit, or whether these are simply the limitations of the watch. Moreover, I contacted Garmin support today and was told that this is a 'known issue' and should be fixed with the next update. This suprises me however because I would assume there would be more threads posted about this problem if that was the case. Would be great if someone from Garmin could weigh in on this!

  • 0 1 month ago

    I also had similar issues with Sony WH-1000XM4, could not figure out the issue unfortunately. Switched over to Shokz headphones and didn't have any problem after

  • 0 1 month ago

    I had the same issue. In your sound connect app you need to select: audio quality and then for stable connection. What this does is switching the Bluetooth decoder from ldac to aac. This is a less heavy decoder what the Forerunner 265 can handle much better.

  • 0 1 month ago in reply to 9023732

    I tested it out and it works out decently overall. There are still some stutters/disconnections, maybe once a minute but it is a lot better than the prefer sound quality mode. 

  • 0 1 month ago in reply to pilator

    When in activity it should be even better. Just don't forget to switch it back if you are going to listen on you phone it makes a lot of difference