music pulses when streamed via bluetooth

[npharrison]

Hi, I have a Samsung Galaxy s20 ultra, and I had the same problem with my s10+, namely that when I stream music from my phone over bluetooth to any of the 3 different speakers, 2 bluetooth headsets and the car radio, the sound output is not consistent. It seems to pulse. If I want to listen to a track on my Sony WH-CH7000N headphones I cannot listen via Poweramp. I have to use the amazon music player or the samsung music player. This is really annoying as I prefer the equaliser on Poweramp and the spread of frequencies it allows. But it's this pulsing (which is the best way I can describe it) which really annoys me. It's rhythmic and I notice it on all tracks I play via bluetooth. It's not there if I plug in headphones, as my initial fear was when I had ripped a CD, something had happened in the conversion process.

Whenever I use wired headphones or another player, the musical output is at a constant level. The songs may go loud and quiet, but the output level doesn't change. But when I switch to bluetooth the output pulses.

I hope I've conveyed what I'm hearing. I did a search on the forums, but as I don't know the technical term for what I'm hearing, it's hard to search for, as searching for bluetooth problems is a whole can of worms.
 

My build is V3-build-882-arm64-play, and my phone, for what it's worth, even though it did the same when I had a 10+ is an SM-G988B/DS running Ui 2.5.

Hopefully we can sort this as it's really bugging me having to switch out of Poweramp to listen to Fear Inoculum by Tool on another app.

 

Many thanks

[andrewilley]

Is this 'pulsing' linked to the beat of the music? e.g. if you have the overall gain set too high, along with a bass EQ boost, then you might get attenuation occurring at peak points.

Andre

[npharrison]

@andrewilley Brilliant! Got it sorted first time! I put on my sony headphones, selected 7empest by Tool, played with various presets, all of which pulsed. I then reset to a flat equaliser and the sound went flat. I was so happy. I then upped the bass and a couple of other lower frequencies on the equaliser with no problem.

What I think I did, several years ago, before bluetooth headphones were a thing, I played with the equaliser, on a heavy rock setting, then turned up the bass gain on the circular dial. On a wired connection, I didn't notice any difference. But on bluetooth it was recognisable. But using just the equaliser without the gain seems to give me the sound I want to hear, but without any pulsing. Thank you so much for recognising what I'd written about.