Intermittent audio glitching with Airpods and M1 Macbook Air

Hello,

I am having a really weird and frustrating intermittent audio issue with my Macbook Air and my Airpods. At seemingly random times, they will have audio lag that is frequently broken by pauses once every second or so, it sounds like some movie or sci-fi sound effect where a robot or a video file stops working correctly but is still playing in real time. Note, there is NO screeching, so it probably isn't an ANC failure. The bandage fix is really simple, pause whatever I am watching, and then press play. Somehow, that temporarily fixes whatever is freaking out.

At first, I thought it was an issue with my Airpods Pro 2s, but I recently got a pair of the Pro 3s and they are having the exact same behavior. Same sound, same lack of predictability, same fix. That tells me that somehow, it's something with my Mac, or maybe a firmware issue on either end.

Oddly, this doesn't seem to happen on the Macbook when I am playing games.

The weirdest part though is this behavior does not happen at all with my iPhone 16. Both sets of Airpods work absolutely perfectly for as long as the batteries last with my iPhone.

For the record, both the Macbook Air and the iPhone are running OS 26.1 as of writing this post, but this bug has been persistent for at least a month. I don't know exactly when it started though, and I have only had the Macbook for a couple of months so I don't know if this is an issue that popped up with the current version of MacOS or something else is going on.

I do have other Macs, but I have not really have had time to test this issue on them yet. The memory is really fuzzy, but I think I might have once had the issue happen on my M1 Mac Mini, but I can't say for certain. I just have noticed this because I watch videos most often between my phone and my Macbook Air

Technically, I could live with this, but it is really annoying and immersion breaking so I want to figure out what is going on and fix it