Fitbit IONIC Music Quality

[tothclan]

 I just purchased and received my new Fitbit IONIC.   After a lot of work with figuring out how to download songs and get my new Bluetooth Headphones to pair, I am having problems with the quality of the songs.   The songs are constant chops and you can't even make out the songs.   I purchased a set of MPOW Sport Wireless headphones and they work great when listening to music on my iPhone.  I've seen posting about putting my watch on my right wrist, but that didn't change the song choppiness.  Music was downloaded from iTunes.  Any suggestions?  

[SunsetRunner]

You are right the quality is horrible, it is like they dropped them to 32bit rate.  It is basically cracking in my ears.  It is very noticeable for me because my MP3s are all high bitrate and most are lossless. 

[AdamMSC]

I get that problem when there is a disruption in the bluetooth connection between the headphones and the watch. I usually turn off the headphones and reconnect them, and that seems to fix the problem for me. 

[SunsetRunner]

I have tried two sets of Bluetooth headphones and the same ones for the same songs on my phone, can't seem to improve it on the ionic, 

[WavyDavey]

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@SunsetRunnerwrote:

You are right the quality is horrible, it is like they dropped them to 32bit rate.  It is basically cracking in my ears.  It is very noticeable for me because my MP3s are all high bitrate and most are lossless. 

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Since MP3 is a compression scheme, I'm under the impression there is no such thing as a lossless mp3?

Fitbit hasn't published the exact specs for bit rate, file size, etc. that the Ionic supports. I do know the Flac folks aren't stoked that lossless isn't supported. High bitrate MP3 might also be an issue.

I've had the problem crop up a couple of times, and just by stopping and starting a track, eliminated the crackling.

[SunsetRunner]

@WavyDaveyMP3 stands for MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) Audio Layer 3 .  It is an encoding format not a compression type.  It does incorporate some compression and there are both lossy and lossless versions of compression.  

In general compression works by eliminating white space and deduplication repeating bits of code so they are only stored once and instead that single copy is referenced when needed. This is basically trading an increase in the processing power requirement for a size reduction. I can go into Constant Bitrate vs Variable Bit Rate but getting kind of off topic.  

[Baulds]

No, your are right, I was thinking the exact same.  MP3s are by nature very lossy.