Ionic sound quality is terrible

[Luc14852]

Recently, I've bought a Ionic to be able to listen to music while running and tracking my run without having to bring my phone. I've just loaded some music onto the device, but I was sadly disappointed to find it giving terrible audio quality when playing on my headphones.

As I was looking in the forums, I saw several other people reporting the same issue and several reported 'solutions', and I've tried some things myself. I've tried the following:

1. Rebooting the device.

2. Unpairing, then re-pairing my headphones

3. I thought it might be the sound files creating the problem, so I tried playing the same files from another device and with the same set of headphones, which worked fine, and I tried playing from the Ionic to a different set of headphones, resulting in the same issue.

3. Re-downloading the music files unto the device.

4. I've even tried downgrading the audio quality of the files so the bluetooth would have less of a problem with it, which didn't work either.

So nothing really worked and I'm kindof at a loss. What's really strange is that when I pause the music and restart, for about a second the music quality is fine, before returning to the crackle.

Please, can you help me? Is anyone else experiencing the same issues? (if you do, please reply here) Is there any guidance from Fitbit on this, which I missed? 

I really hate having paid quite some money on a device that doesn't do what it's supposed to.

[Rich_Laue]

I found that the sound quality was not bad, depending on the headphones or speaker. 

My issue is with the Bluetooth connection. 

[dell2394]

Luc14852, I'm having the same exact issue as you! I have a pair of cheap ONN brand headphones (from Walmart) that I bought years ago. They worked fine for the past 3 months with my Ionic until one of the buds shorted out (not the Ionic's fault, obviously). Now I'm trying to replace the buds and I'm having a hard time finding a set that are compatible with the Ionic.

I first bought another pair of ONN bluetooth headphones because, well, they're cheap and they worked before...no go. So, I went back to the store and picked up a pair of SkullCandy JIB XT headphones with Bluetooth 5...no go. 

This is weird because I've been reading everyone's posts (literally everyone's) about having bluetooth headphones issues and it seems incredibly sporadic. Some people can get bluetooth 5 to work. Others report using bluetooth 4.2 or 4.1 version headphones. Bluetooth 5 is supposed to be backward compatible and should work with 4.0 tranceivers in our Ionics; however, that is not the case with the SkullCandy phones I bought, so I'm wondering if it isn't so much an issue with the version of bluetooth headphones we try, but rather an issue of a handful (perhaps a very large handful) of faulty Ionic devices.

I chatted with a Fitbit rep. yesterday who said that Fitbit is aware of the headphones issue and is working to fix it. She told me she wrote down my email and username info and will reach out when a fix is available. She told me to keep my app updated for a notification of some kind. Since people have been commenting on this issue since 2017, I will try to stifle my laughter for now.