Why does my sound all distorted after upgrading to i OS 5

Yes, i can confirm this on iPad 2 After upgrading to IOS 5. Sound is really bad, listening to lossless audio makes no Fun anymore. I Restored my IPad 2 back to IOS 4.3.5 I use a Sennheiser HD238 for listening.

I have noticed the same problem since upgraded to iOS 5. Nothing to do with Equalizer/Volume settings/Sound Check as these are switched off on my Iphone4 - in iOS4 and iOS5.

I had listened to the same song just before the iOS5 upgrade, and then immediately after the upgrade an hour later. Huge difference!! Songs in iOS5 are now more bassy (but the bad kind). Very disappointed.

In some songs, the increased bass results in horrible distortion and made headphones crackly.

I understand this happens if you are using expensive head/ear phones - someone in Apple has boosted up the Bass setting in iOS 5 in order to make cheaper earphones sounds "better" but unfortunately has a detrimental effect on high-performance headphones (like the £250 Bowers and Wilkins P5).

For more than a year, my songs sounded perfect/natural on iOS4 with Bowers and Wilkins P5, without any need for EQ/Soundcheck....and now iOS5 has destroyed the audio quality.

I hope Apple will restore the music quality in iOS5. Please Apple - return the dB+ settings to their proper levels. Test them with good quality headphones sold in your stores!

Hi there.

I have the exact same problem, ever since I 'upgraded' my iPod Touch to iOS5 the other day the sound has been atrocious. I thought it was the headphones at first but everything sounds perfectly fine through my computer so I know the iPod is at fault.

Apple: You're going to need to fix this, and fix it fast.

agreed ! i updated my iphone 4 last week, worked just fine until today . volume is FULL blast and i can't hear anything. music is crackling and the sounds are just horrible.. please fix.(:

Absolutely. That was the first thing I noticed about the the update to ios5. It is really noticable when streaming audio from an internet site, or Pandora. Any deep voice gets very distorted, as well as bass. I've tried all the equalizer settings with no fix. My iphone 4 had the best sound before the update, now it sounds like a cheap $10.00 clock radio.

Hey!! I've got the solution.

this is some what a format problem.

if you see a aac file, it's not all the same aac format. there are, aac low complexity VBR, aac low complexity CBR, aac high-efficiency. the files are being corrupted are the aac high-efficiency. make sure you don't convert your file using aac HE or high-efficiency.

to check if it's HE,

in itunes left click on a song and click "get info", go to "summary tab and it will appear on the right upper corner..

you'll have to delete the files with HE on the ios device, convert the original files to low complexity then load it again to your ios device.

I don't know why it sounds wrong only on iOS 5 though...

hope it helps!!

shunu2565 wrote:

Hey!! I've got the solution.

this is some what a format problem.

if you see a aac file, it's not all the same aac format. there are, aac low complexity VBR, aac low complexity CBR, aac high-efficiency. the files are being corrupted are the aac high-efficiency. make sure you don't convert your file using aac HE or high-efficiency.

to check if it's HE,

in itunes left click on a song and click "get info", go to "summary tab and it will appear on the right upper corner..

you'll have to delete the files with HE on the ios device, convert the original files to low complexity then load it again to your ios device.

I don't know why it sounds wrong only on iOS 5 though...

hope it helps!!

I'm having the same problem, but my AAC files don't seem to sound nearly as bad as my MP3 files. I'm using decent Sony headphones and the sound is really bad, much worse than before the upgrade. As others have said, the bass is louder, but in a bad way (too boomy) and the midrange sounds distorted, scratchy, and over-compressed. It's not as bad on my iPad as my iPhone 4, and the identical tracks, with the same headphones, sound fine on my iPod Classic, which of course didn't get the update. Very annoying! Several users have reported that the following "fix" takes care of the problem, so I'm trying it right now, but I have a lot of music and it takes a while to process all my tracks, so I can't guarantee anything:

1. Open iTunes

2. Select all your tracks

3. Select "get info" or the Windows equivalent

4. Choose the "options" tab

5. Move the volume slider up or down from its current setting

6. Allow the change to process

7. Repeat the procedure, but move the volume slider to "zero"

8. Synch your music

As I said, I cannot guarantee that it works, but others who have tried it say that it does.

It was taking forever to process the change to all my tracks, so I stopped the process and just experimented with a couple playlists that I synch to my iPhone. Good news: music sounds much better after following the procedure and I'm now going to go back into iTunes and apply the process to all my tracks. The distortion and compressed sound are gone, and the bass sounds more natural.

I forgot to mention that while iTunes was applying the volume change, my Mac was doing a major Time Machine back-up (over 50 GB). I think that since there was a change being applied to multiple music tracks, Time Machine was dutifully backing them up as altered files. This was not only causing a very long, slow Time Machine back up, it was also slowing down the process in iTunes. So my advice is to turn Time Machine OFF while you do the change, then turn it back on afterwards.

Well for one thing, what the heck are you guys doing listening to AACs and MP3s with 250 pound headphones? Didn't anybody ever tell you that lossy ecoding has one setting: "crap?" If you're interested in good audio quality enough to buy studio-grade headphones, at least encode your files in ALAC.

Apple very well might have done something screwy with iOS 5 to make cheap headphones sound better, but why don't you all run out, grap your CD collection, reimport them into iTunes in ALAC format, resync your device with those files, listen to them with good headphones, and tell me if it still sounds bad.

Besides, doesn't the music app on iOS have an equalizer with an option of "bass reduction?"