Bluetooth signal quality - skipping music

dr_mat said:

I too found it worse when my pebble was connected to the phone, but even disconnecting the pebble doesn't really make it acceptably good..

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Having multiple devices is another thing I should have mentioned in my post. For me, it would only happen once in awhile, not all the time. I did have an OBDII BT adapter also connected at the same time for a long while (BT connected, but not connected to torque app at the time of the issue). I have the OBD BT adapter removed for now to see if the problem comes back. So far, it hasn't, but I haven't tested long enough to know for sure.

Obviously, there could be more than one reason for this perceived issue (interference, poor radio strength, multi-device bandwidth management issues in the BT driver/kernel stack etc.), so it is great to compare notes.

I have this problem too. My car is RHD, and I keep my phone in my right pocket, so to the door.
I get intermittent skipping from my Galaxy S6.

Get the same problem with my Wife's Sony Z3c.

Never had such issues with any other car and A2DP streaming.

On my old BMW I could leave my phone in my back in the boot and still get crystal clear audio.

With the Golf I keep having to put the phone in the cup holders or in my vent mount...
Rather annoying.


VW engineers obviously anticipated everyone having to put there phone in the cup holders or cubby as the radio even reminds you "Remember your phone" when it shuts off!

No issues with my iPhone 6 all positions work

I'm having this issue, too. Streaming music just totally sucks, there's so much stuttering and skipping it's totally unbearable. Phone audio works great. Both statements are true from all positions in the car, including in the glove box, where someone said the BT receiver is. Also, I can't replicate the issue under any conditions with my bluetooth speaker or headphones. That seems to indicate to me that it's a circuitry/firmware(/even software) issue with the car, and has nothing to do with my phone. To boot, I didn't have the issue for the first few week or two that I owned the car, so I'm a little confused as to why it's happening now. Pretty upset about it. I hope to get to the bottom of the issue... nobody who's experienced this problem and come here to say so ever stuck it to VW for a fix?

Volkswagen bluetooth is junk

This is not a phone issue. I have replicated this in every car on the Volkswagen lot that has this stereo setup. I showed the dealer and service techs, we did it with every phone everyone had at the dealer. Samsung, Apple, Sony, Hauweii, HTC, Motorola. Every car and every phone did the exact same thing. If you have this stereo, you have this problem. If you think you don't have this problem then you just don't know how to replicate it (or you have a different setup).

I am royally pissed that they sold me (and so many others) a new 2015 that has the same issue as a 2012. This makes me certain they are not going to offer any fixes, especially now with all the other legal issues they are dealing with. The 2016 IS FIXED by the way, I verified that as well, but thats new hardware (finally). I now have a 2015 I hate. I would not have purchased this vehicle if I had known the bluetooth did not work properly. Why do we have a stereo that looks like it came from y2k?

I am fighting with the dealer over this but I doubt it will go anywhere. Volkswagen is making it clear it is not customer focused.

If anyone knows a way to replace the bluetooth junk with something new that still works with all the oem features I would love to know about it! The nav sucks, the bluetooth, the touchscreen, the car-net. They are so far behind. Why the heck does their bluetooth fade in such that directions from your phone are useless? Junk. Hard-wiring is NOT a solution to the problem, its a work-around to their junk.

For our 2013 estate, it works in some phones for us. HTC One X and One X+ were bad when pebble was reading music status but worked OK otherwise.
Oneplus One stuttered all the time, hardly usable.
Moto X Play works perfectly, as does a Sony experia z3.
Key difference was that the OPO was running cyanogen not raw android. Have seen posts in the OPO forums complaining from other users too.
I suspect it's an interaction between the Bluetooth stack on some phones and the specific version on the car.. Still sucks but at least I now have a phone that seems to work well with it.

Sent from my XT1562 using Tapatalk

midnit said:

Why the heck does their bluetooth fade in such that directions from your phone are useless?

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I haven't detected the fade-in you mention. You mean when the radio is on but you are relying on Bluetooth audio to override?

Otherwise that will be a phone setting or a navigation app setting to do with audio focus changes in android.

dr_mat said:

I haven't detected the fade-in you mention. You mean when the radio is on but you are relying on Bluetooth audio to override?

Otherwise that will be a phone setting or a navigation app setting to do with audio focus changes in android.

Click to expand...

The fade issue has been with golf for some time and its disgusting its still an issue. When it detects "no sound" for a bit it mutes the bluetooth channel, which seems like a good idea, but when it detects sound again there is a slight delay as it recognizes and fades the channel back up to regular volume. so when the phone nav says "up ahead take a right" all you can hear is "ake a right". This problem is even more frustrating when you take into account that the built in nav (that was paid for) is junk.

It is not a phone issue, its a "feature" of this junk.

I don't know anything about this "our estate" but if its got the same hardware, its got the same problem. Both Moto X and Sony Xperia experience the same thing. We tested 8 phones in 13 cars - all behaved exactly the same. The only car it worked correctly in was a 2016.

If anyone has useful information about a true solution that would be wonderful. The dealer updated the software yesterday and it did nothing for the problem but now the soundaktor randomly fires off with no purpose - lovely support these vehicles have.

Ah yeah. Have to leave some background music on...

Sent from my XT1562 using Tapatalk

Has this issue been solved? I have this music jitter/stutter problem in my 2017 Golf TSI (do not have this problem in my 2013 Jetta Hybrid). Seems to be ANY Android device I use (have not tried iPhone). It's unbearably annoying.

I've found my Bluetooth audio experience greatly improved by getting a high end device.

Sent from my ONEPLUS A3003 using Tapatalk

I'm glad I found this thread. Too bad it's only at the complaint lever rather than the solution level. I have a 2015 GTI and Xiaomi MI4 phone with the latest Lineage build on it. For me there are 2 things that happen. One is the phone or the OS or "something in the phone". It happens that I will get in the car, start up and the phone connects. Music stutters so badly that I may or may not play an entire song. I reboot the phone and "magically" it all gets better. There is obviously something going on in the phone that a reboot fixes. I don't know why it doesn't effect phone calls which always work. It's just music that gets scrambled. This is somehow phone related or phone and car related.

The other issue is with "something else". If music is playing correctly and smoothly, at random, it will skip or glitch for several seconds and then go right back to playing normally again. At first I thought it was RF interference, but if that was the case, I should be able to go past the same places that the glitching happened last and have it happen again, but it's totally random.

My phone is always in my cup holder. I sometimes forget to take it out of my pocket, but 99% of the time it's directly in front of the hand brake. I still get the random glitching regardless of where the phone is located.

I'm not sure where the problem lies. I have a pair of BOSE QC35 BT headphones and they never glitch. At home my 5.1 speakers support BT 3.x. They never glitch. I'm leaning away from the phone as the real problem.

"Bluetooth signal quality", when it comes to music, is an oxymoron.

Use iPod/iPhone, USB stick, or SD card, and drive happy. Say "hell no" to (further) compressed music.

The Bluetooth media stack requires the phone to recompress the audio, so it has to uncompressed your source file (aac internet stream, or MP3 file, or whatever) to a nice pcm audio stream, then compress it again to the Bluetooth apt-x or whatever protocol has been negotiated between devices. The issue seems to be that background activity on the phone causes this to become somewhat laggy at times. There isn't a lot of buffering on a Bluetooth audio stream so the phone has to keep up the encoding.

Audio for telephone use is much lower bandwidth and much less demanding on the hardware or the reliability and performance of the transmission.


...if it creaks, it's probably made by VAG

dr_mat said:

The Bluetooth media stack requires the phone to recompress the audio, so it has to uncompressed your source file (aac internet stream, or MP3 file, or whatever) to a nice pcm audio stream, then compress it again to the Bluetooth apt-x or whatever protocol has been negotiated between devices. The issue seems to be that background activity on the phone causes this to become somewhat laggy at times. There isn't a lot of buffering on a Bluetooth audio stream so the phone has to keep up the encoding.

Audio for telephone use is much lower bandwidth and much less demanding on the hardware or the reliability and performance of the transmission.


...if it creaks, it's probably made by VAG

Click to expand...

Phone call audio is typically NOT 20-20K...more like 200-5k and only in mono so lots less data transferred than is stereo audio. What you are saying is probably true...IE: compressing audio streams creates overhead, but phones have ASIC's in them that handle this sort of thing in hardware so that running them through the CPU shouldn't really apply very much. Also, if what you said was the underlying problem, then why do my Bose QC35's never glitch? It's the same phone, running the same apps and back ground processes.