I'm experiencing an annoying bug with my Airpod 2 Pros, firmware 5B58.
Despite having Spacial Audio, head Tracking, Headphone Accommodations, Transparency and Noise Reduction all turned off, I am hearing fake room sound added to mono source material such as audiobooks. Not only that, but when I move my head, the sound shifts in the stereo field, and settles back to phantom center position after about five seconds.
This is happening on an iPhone 8 plus running iOS 16.2.
If you are experiencing this bug as well, please report it to Apple at the following link:
https://www.apple.com/feedback/airpods/
Thank you and have a great 2023 to come!
Chris
Comments
As a developer, I can say…
As a developer, I can say nobody is reporting that. Remember, iOS forces the user to decide what content uses spatial audio, so, perhaps you turned it off when listening to music, but it is still enabled for your audiobook player app. Double check it, following the same steps again. By the way, voiceover is actually buggish when anouncing the state of that screen showing buttons for head tracking, etc, so another possibility is you think it is turned off, but it isn't.
Hope it helps.
Spacial Audio per app?
So, are you saying I must turn these things on or off for each individual app?
Follow-up
Going Settings > Accessibility > Audio & Visual > Mono, and turning that on does turn off spatial audio. But I don't want to have to do that each time I want to listen to mono material without spatial audio. Plus I would have to go back and turn Mono off when I wanted to play stereo material again.
Older iPhone
Hi @The Oliver Kennett:
I'm not sure if it matters, but I have an iPhone 8 plus. 10 or later is required for the custom spatial audio set up, in other words, a True Depth camera.
I have a call back from Apple later this morning, so I'll post whatever they tell me here.
Exactly, you must turn it…
Exactly, you must turn it off for each app. Or at least each content tipe. You can have spatial audio of for apple music, but, since Apple has a little mess with the spatial audio stuff (spatial audio vs spatialization), your audiobook player could be set into spatialization mode. Turn it off showing the control center, tripple tapping on the volume slider, then double tap on the current stereo status button, whatever it is, and finally select off.
The process itself shows that apple is overcomplicating things here.
Hope it helps.
Alan: How Did You Figure That Out?
Hi @Alan.
Can I ask how you figured that out?
I did poke around Control Center, but couldn't find much. Double tapping on Airpods 2 Pro just expanded the media playback and sharing controls.
I would never have thought to triple tap on the volume slider.
This is not at all obvious and, as far as I can tell, not documented anywhere either. I've been looking all over the place online, including
Apple Support, Youtube, and Reddit.
Either that, or I am just interpreting the instructions wrong while adapting them for use with Voiceover.
Fixed
Alan nailed it. I couldn't turn off the spatial audio component, not personal spatial audio, just but the fixed type. I needed to triple tap on the volume slider in Control Center, with audio playing in the particular app for which I want to change the behavior.
Well, really I noticed that…
Well, really I noticed that behavior testing the new spatial audio feature for a spanish podcast I collaborate with. The tripple tapping on the volume slider is because I read somewhere sighted users must double tap on it, ence voiceover users should perform a tripple tap instead. I send feedback to Apple about that, it seems a little strange and hard to access for voiceover users, but no changes has made since the initial release.
"If anyone knows another way, please share it :)