Audible artifacts when processing engine is enabled

Support
1

Issue description:

Clean install, defined the media provider, audible artifacts not present in FLAC files streamed from Jellyfin hosted on a TrueNAS server. Turn on the processing engine and random popping artifacts can be heard. Turn the processing engine off again and the artifacts disappear.

I have heard this on both my phone and my tablet and stumbled across it while applying an AutoEQ for my headphones. I can reproduce this on both devices with the AutoEQ enabled and disabled but still having the processing engine turned on.

Logs:

Upload description: Artifacts in audio with processing engine turned on - 4ipqiaxm

Additional information:

 
Devices used: Google Pixel 6 / Lenovo Tab P12.
 

Reproduction steps:

 
Clean install, define media provider, enable processing engine and stream FLAC audio from Jellyfin hosted on a TrueNAS server. No other settings were changed.

Turn off processing engine and artifacts disappear.
 

Media provider:

Jellyfin

Screenshots:

     

2

Reduce the block size in the advanced settings it usually fix this on lower end devices.

As the EQ screen says the EQ engine depends on OS provided libraries that can have bugs sometimes too.

3

Artifacts are still present when using 512 block size. Are Google Pixel phones known to have buggy libraries with Android 14?

4

No it works well on those devices usually.

I test on P6 Pro and P8 Pro.

Be sure to disable EQ then enable it again when changing settings and eventually restart the phone to be sure.

5

@4ipqiaxm - Had the exact same issue with my Pixel and headphones. Enabling offload in the decoding settings worked immediately for me.

6

Offload disable EQ on most devices so this is not really a solution.

7

Huh, that’s odd. I had to enable offload because of artifacts and the settings I have with the processing engine (EQ, limiter and preamp) are applied. Must be more Pixel weirdness.

8

After extensive testing it would appear that the artifacts are most likely caused by the LDAC codec upsampling 44.1kHz content to 96kHz. I cannot make the lower sampling rate persist so I have switched to AAC 44.1kHz / 16 bit and have had no further issues.

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