Boring design aside, the Google Pixel and Pixel XL are two of the best premium Android phones (if not the best) you can buy right now. While the Pixel phones impressed many at their launch, several issues have been cropping up one at a time.
A post from a Pixel XL owner, Ryan Lestage, on Google's official Pixel user community forum, from back on October 24, suggests the audio issues extend to all audio including "talk radio or music played in Chrome, Facebook, TuneIn Radio, YouTube, etc". The problem is that Google has yet to admit that there is a problem with the phones.
Buckman checks for the issue on every Pixel unit by playing the trailer of the upcoming The Mummy movie reboot.
Reddit user badmark created a thread about the problem yesterday, and it has gained quite a bit of traction. The fix to this issue could easily be distributed by Google via a software update, however, the tech giant is yet to even acknowledge that the issue exists.
Orrin Hancock, Pixel Community Manager at Google, assured users back in early November that Google is now investigating the issue. Not only that, but now reports are coming in that the speakers have a "crackling" problem. There have been numerous reports on Reddit and other forums about the Google Pixel's speaker and how it crackles at high volume. Still, this is a significant issue for a $649 smartphone from Google, and it's one worth trying to resolve.
We're going to put our own Pixel handset through this test later today, but looking back at our Google Pixel review, we note that the handset produced less distortion, not more, at max volume than the Nexus 6P. Some Reddit users who commented say they haven't seen the problem themselves, but the large majority is in agreement: the Pixel has a "crackling" problem under pretty random scenarios.
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