If you’re having audio drifting issues with your AirPods Pro 2 earbuds, you might not be alone.
Per Reddit and other online forums, a number of users have cited an audio drifting issue which occurs even when Apple’s features like Spatial Audio and dynamic head tracking are disabled.
Audio drifting is an issue with headphones where the sound shifts between each side of the two earbuds. The audio will move back and forth between earbuds and can also get out of sync with videos. In this scenario, the audio wouldn’t lineup with the mouth of whoever is speaking in that video.
One user offered the following description of the issue on Reddit:
This is my second pair of AirPods Pro 2 and the audio still seems to shift/drift all over the place sometimes it can compress the volume of a song and than randomly raise the volume. No, it’s not head tracking or spatial audio I have turned those off.
Another AirPods Pro 2 user specifically notices the issue most often in the YouTube app:
I’ve had a similar issue with my APP2. I’m using spatial audio and watching YouTube, and for almost videos, after an ad plays, the AirPods go out of sync with each other. As if one is slightly lacking behind the other. I ti sounds like the voice of people in videos are right at my ears instead in the middle of my head like it’s supposed to sound. The only way I’ve been able to combat this is to turn off and back on spatial audio which seems to re-sync up the airpods. Pretty annoying
It’s been speculated that the issue could be a bug within the noice cancellation or Adaptive Transparency features. The common factor also seems to be that the issue occurs when Spatial Audio and dynamic head tracking are disabled.
Apple has yet to officially acknowledge the issue, and it’s unknown as to whether this is a hardware or software issue. The issue doesn’t appear to be incredibly widespread, and the company has yet to state when it could offer a software or firmware update to sort out the error.
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.