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unstable Bluetooth Sennheiser Sonite Rise / Pixel 11

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I've been having a horribly unstable connection since I upgraded my cell phone a week ago to a Pixel 11. They were working fine with my seven year old Oneplus 9 phone.

It's only during phone calls, not when streaming media. At first I thought it was instability from WiFi calling. WiFi calling was leading to some bad call quality for sure, but even with that off it's bad

I'll get some sporadic static in the aids, it seems like its hearing aids and not a cellular thing. Very minor. A few minutes in to the call, though, it will randomly either drop both aids, or it seems like more often it'll drop one and the other stays on the call for a time, then the dead one will sometimes come back online, or the good one will drop out. Sometimes it's a momentary thing and sometimes it drops long enough for the phone call to revert back to the phone's earpiece or speaker.... then after more time the aids will without warning pick back up. Seems like just a random mix of these things happening. My right aid is primary, and often, or maybe always, the right aid is the first one to drop. I've spent quite a bit of time with Google and trying to adjust different settings in the phone and in the Easy Line App. even to the point of deleting the Easy line app completely.

The last thing I've tried and haven't yet really tested is going into developer mode on my phone and turning ON the "Disable Bluetooth A2DP hardware offloading" toggle. I did the switch but I have not yet tested it with a long call.

That seems like my last chance thing to try.

I have a Costco appointment tomorrow as a routine follow-up. Google AI suggests that I have him 1) switch the primary to be the left, and 2) reflash the firmware

Do ya'll have any other ideas before I try to return this phone?

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Try forgetting the aids, remove the Sennheiser/Phonak app, boot the phone, reinstall the app and do a fresh pairing of the aids with that phone.

Let us know if that helped.

thanks. Sadly those were some of the first things I tried without any luck. I've also done things such as cleared cache

What's interesting, I think, is that the issue happens during calls but not during streaming audio/video. Google seems to think it's something to do with the phones effort to manage the Bluetooth power requirements to save battery...something about the added drain from the two-way communication as opposed to the one-way used with streaming.

Do you know if the phone is set on in Developer settings? My processors are not LE Audio but my Pixel 9 is. After updates I typically have to turn LE Audio off or I have random Bluetooth issues.

I don't know, but I do know that in the standard settings menu that's one of the things I've verified several times to be OFF.

I just now went back into developer mode to check

Under Bluetooth mode, its set to "Unicast and Broadcast". Maybe that should be "disabled" instead...I don't know.... over my head

In that same menu is the "Disable Bluetooth A2DP hardware offload" that Google told be to turn ON. (it didn't work)

I find it interesting that it had me looking at the A2DP setting but did not mention anything about disabling LE audio there, but I clearly remember verifying someplace else that I can't remember, that it's not in LE mode....

update to this issue: This morning, I contacted Google support directly for the pixel support people. They routed me to the group that handles disability issues and I went through it with them in detail, even down to verifying the build number in the hearing aids. They even got to experience the problem first hand during the call!

They have entered a case and left it with me that they will be responding back to me by email. Sadly they didn't tell me a timeline.

Try turning the unicast broadcast off. You can always turn it back on.

It's nice you are getting help from Google and they had the chance to see the issue.

Something else you might try is in the Easyline app. In settings find bandwidth. I think it can be set in auto or manual. That's something worth changing just to see what happens.

This is from old memories so I could be way off on this.

spot on...there is a setting under Bluetooth. Default is "Enhanced Sound Quality (adaptive bandwidth)". Switched it to Normal fixed bandwidth. That was another one of those things I played with early on

I really don't like messing around so much in the settings, but I disabled the unicast in the name of science. I'll make a test call in a bit and see how it goes...

sure do wish that I'd kept notes listing everything that I've changed in the settings so that I can go back and undo all the stuff that didn't work!

That unicast setting forces a reboot, and the setting reverts to the default every time (did it twice). Google says that it's because it checks and I don't have anything using LE audio. Instead there's another toggle that it says will persist (Disable Bluetooth LE audio hardware offload.) So I tried it, but it doesn't persist either.

Honestly that makes me a little more satisfied. It would seem pretty janky if I had to turn off LE audio when I'm not even using it. Should be smart enough to turn it off automatically if it's not being used....that said, it does seem like it must be something janky like that going on.

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