iPad Pro 12.9 5th Gen Pops Sound Distortion

Hi everyone,
Just picked up a 5th Gen iPad Pro and I'm getting popping sounds when playing back HD channels on a HDRHomeRun Dual Tuner.

Is anyone else seeing this? The same tuner is playing back fine on the Channels App on iPhone and previously on the 3rd Gen iPad Pro. It also plays back fine on the HDHomeRun iOS App. It's just Channels that's having these sound distortions.

Suspect it's a M1 chip issue with the 5th Gen iPad Pro.

Does it happen all the time or only when a notification comes in and plays a sound?

It happens randomly, all the time, on every TV channel. There is no notification happening.
But only on the iPad Pro 5th Gen.
I can have the same channel running simultaneously on other iOS devices and there are no pops on any other device.

Does changing Settings > Playback > Advanced > Audio Driver help?

2 Likes

I will give the experimental setting a try and will advise.

Hey Aman - setting the audio to Experimental has reduced the popping sound.
Hope that helps you debug the issue.

Same iPad, same issue. Experimental seems to reduce on my end as well

Same issue. Changing the audio driver seems to have cleared up the issue.

I just bought a new 2021 iPad Pro and noticed the choppy/popping audio immediately. I came to this forum to find out why and I'll have to try changing that audio driver.

Having the same issue on 12.9 5th gen running 16.1 IOS. Thought it might be compatibility issue with IOS 16.1 beta. Will try experimental audio. Popping happens randomly and frequently.

update: experimental driver indeed does make it much better. Any plans to fix in regular driver?

I'm having the same issue, glitchy audio and heavy distortion, on iPad Mini 5th gen, ios 16.3, also iPad 8th gen, ios 15.x. Tried many transcoder settings.
This seems to happen with earPods 2nd gen. Audio seems ok out of speakers, appleTV 4k and plays ok in web browser on iMac 2011 both ethernet and wifi. Web browser on iPad Mini also seems ok but Channels app not ok. Audio in channels also in general sounds somewhat dirty in the App on everything. It's worse when level limiter on ipad is set to protect hearing from youtube commercials etc. To me it sounds like the decoder is running at it's max input level. I ran into this years ago as an Audio eng. on certain high end CD players and by dropping the audio level on CD audio 1 db below max input it cleared up. BTW audio seems ok when playing the same video in Jellyfin.

Settings > Playback > Advanced > Audio Driver: Experimental

Sorry I'm not seeing that Advanced menu item either under settings or clients>playback.

It's on your device in the Channels app

Thanks,
certainly cleared up the clipping, even with the level limiter, hearing protection, on.

same problem with pops sound repeating on all channels on an iPad Pro (11-inch)(3rd generation). Changing to the Experimental audio driver has improved things.