Pandora Audio quality poor compared to Blackberry

[MyNewDroidX]

Hey guys,

I ran some tests today with pandora. My wife has a new blackberry bold. I tested the quality with the 3.5 jack through her ford escape, which has built in line in.

Result; The droid x sucks, its very tinney sounding and staticky. The blackberry sounds like CD quality

Fyi - I do have the high quality sound turned on in the pandora settings.

Fyi2 - my iphone sucked on my pioneer nav head unit on both bluetooth and cable. Yet my wifes blackberry sounds like CD quality over bluetooth.

What do you guys think? Is it possible that blackberry had that much better audio quality? Seems strange that both my droid and iphone fail in comparison to the blackberry.

P.S. My wife, who is not music savvy at all, noticed the major difference in sound.

 

[odell]

Boy this is scary...Ive had a blackberry for ever and my pandora is great. I jsut wanted to change. I hope im happy with this Droid X... I should have it by the 25th....

 

[dwagner88]

Just wait for Froyo. It gets worse. On 2.1 it was perfect on the OG Droid. Now I can't stand to listen to it. It sounds like it is under water, even when the audio quality is set to high on Pandora's settings.

 

[MyNewDroidX]

Just wait for Froyo. It gets worse. On 2.1 it was perfect on the OG Droid. Now I can't stand to listen to it. It sounds like it is under water, even when the audio quality is set to high on Pandora's settings.

I will throw something out there, my iphone pandora sounded better through bluetooth than the cable. I used to question that the iphone paused better neutral sound through bluetooth than the jack. I only thought this because volume wasnt controllable on bluetooth, but the volume did effect with the cable. Crazy stuff...will be interested see to how windows phone 7 does being so zune heavy.

 

[solidsnake4119]

Boy this is scary...Ive had a blackberry for ever and my pandora is great. I jsut wanted to change. I hope im happy with this Droid X... I should have it by the 25th....

I'm in the same boat as you. I'm getting the Droid X by the 25th. I regularly use Pandora.

How bad is Pandora's quality? :icon_eek:

 

[droiddadi]

Pandora quality is good on 2.1. Droidx is shipping with 2.1. It screwed up in 2.2 due to a bug.

google just fixed the issue.

 

[Dysan]

I had that same problem with my nexus one. Once I upgraded to 2.2 the sound quality of pandora went right down the tube.

I really hope that doesn't happen on the X since it's nice being able to listed to pandora again.

 

[Backnblack]

The Official OTA 2.2 has a fix for the streaming issues of pandora, sirius, ect....

 

[odell]

droid x pandora

" Pandora quality is good on 2.1. Droidx is shipping with 2.1. It screwed up in 2.2 due to a bug.

google just fixed the issue" droiddadi said



That makes me feel better. I hate change but my blackberry was getting boring....Most of what you hear on this forum is Bi....ng about Droid. I hope its not that bad. There are tons of people trying to buy this phone. Something has to be good about it to cause people to sramble to purchase it. Even sales people at the Verizon Stores are buying it.

 

[rolandct]

" Pandora quality is good on 2.1. Droidx is shipping with 2.1. It screwed up in 2.2 due to a bug.

google just fixed the issue" droiddadi said



That makes me feel better. I hate change but my blackberry was getting boring....Most of what you hear on this forum is Bi....ng about Droid. I hope its not that bad. There are tons of people trying to buy this phone. Something has to be good about it to cause people to sramble to purchase it. Even sales people at the Verizon Stores are buying it.

Thats because the people who like it don't post "i love it". It's like a restaurant manager hears more complaints than praise even at a successful establishment. Does the X have some bugs? Of course. Is the phone outstanding and live up to the hype? Mostly*.

*I believe when 2.2 is released I will change my answer to Completely.

 

[Ed Blown Vert]

Hey guys,

I ran some tests today with pandora. My wife has a new blackberry bold. I tested the quality with the 3.5 jack through her ford escape, which has built in line in.

Result; The droid x sucks, its very tinney sounding and staticky. The blackberry sounds like CD quality

Fyi - I do have the high quality sound turned on in the pandora settings.

Fyi2 - my iphone sucked on my pioneer nav head unit on both bluetooth and cable. Yet my wifes blackberry sounds like CD quality over bluetooth.

What do you guys think? Is it possible that blackberry had that much better audio quality? Seems strange that both my droid and iphone fail in comparison to the blackberry.

P.S. My wife, who is not music savvy at all, noticed the major difference in sound.

I noticed the same thing coming from the Droid.
But once I added some bass from within the phone, it sounded much better.

 

[rolandct]

I don't have an BB to compare it to but mine sounds good to me. I don't notice a drastic difference between it and the CDs I play. Though I also don't crank my music very loud which I'm sure would make any difference more noticeable.

 

[droid_freak]

Its all due to the new codex (stagefreight) that google was pushing that causes the problems with 2.2. As stated earlier google is going to add in the support for the older codex that the streaming providers are using.

Sent from my Droid using Tapatalk

 

[Essex]

So if we did the manual update how do we go about fixing the issue?

 

[ffej89]

Pandora and other audio streaming apps using the AAC+ codec are not working properly since updating to 2.2 OTA. Consider Pandora basically useless until the next Android OS update, _IF_ Google chooses to fix it. The problem was reported as long ago as May in numerous forums, but apparently that didn't prompt anything to be done about it for the past three months leading up to the official release. Had I known how bad the audio quality would be after Froyo, I absolutely would NOT have updated, even considering biggies like SD app storage and Flash support.


Reply from Pandora tech support:

"Froyo has a problem processing our AAC+ files. We have confirmed that this is an issue in the OS. Hopefully they will have it fix in the next Android release. Thanks for your patience in the meantime."


I feel bad to a point for all the app developers that just got soccer punched with Froyo slaughtering their audio quality, but I also cannot understand how they didn't see this coming if they tested it, unless Google decided to go ahead anyway with the release. The only temporary fix seems to be to root the phone and deactivate the StageFright player in 2.2, but that may introduce other problems.

[FIX] Fix poor AAC streaming performance (Pandora, Slacker, etc) on Froyo - xda-developers
Any Pandora users running Froyo - xda-developers


For the other 99% of users, including myself, who will not be rooting their phone, it could be anybody's guess how long we have to wait for the next OS update... 2.21? 2.3? Weeks? Months?

I already spent half an hour on the phone with Sprint telling them what I really thought of Froyo basically destroying streaming audio on my EVO. This is an embarrassment to all parties involved, nobody is denying it, but there seems to be no known ETA for resolution. Now that 2.2 is officially being unleashed on the public, Google/HTC/Sprint needs to state that resources will be directed to resolving this as soon as possible, with an estimate for how soon 2.x will be available.


For those who updated to 2.2 and have crap sound, _please_ add your comments to the Google Code Android thread #9308 and be sure to star the issue to raise the bug ranking:

Issue 9308 - android - eaac+ and aac+ decoding sound quality problems (Android 2.2) - Project Hosting on Google Code


For those who don't think they have the problem, have you tried with a decent pair of headphones? The issue and cause have been confirmed by Pandora tech support, but they cannot fix it as the bug also affects many other streaming apps (Slacker, Rhapsody, Sirius, etc.) and must be fixed by Google. This is not a figment of anyone's imagination, so given the technical explanation already described of the problem, it seems quite odd that anyone on 2.2 would NOT notice the sound degradation, unless they rooted and applied the temp fix as previously documented at XDA. Either there is another variable not being considered or different people seem to be judging the sound quality differently based on their hearing ability/sensitivity. I can assure you that to my and many other people's ears, it totally *SUCKS* now.