iPhone X Owners Cry ‘CracklingGate’ And Complain Of Horrible Sound From Its Earpiece Speaker

Apple's latest top-end iPhone may cost a cool $1,000 USD, but that hasn't stopped it from flying off of the shelves and into the hands of those who couldn't imagine not having the best possible iPhone available. Whether you like its design, its speed, or leading-edge technologies (like face recognition), the iPhone X has myriad features that comprise what is an otherwise very alluring smartphone, despite its cost.

It seems that not everything is heavenly about Apple's new iPhone X, however.  There are usually a few caveats with every new device that in fact may not affect you personally, and if they don't, consider yourself lucky. However, if this latest iPhone X issue could certainly be a showstopper for some. 

reddit user dback83 praises their iPhone X up and down, but loathes the earpiece speaker noise created when trying to listen to certain types of content at reasonable (or even unreasonable) volume. dback83 writes: "even at low-50% volume the audio sounds pretty bad. Turn it up to 80-100% and it's nearly unlistenable."

The issue is apparently not just happening with phone calls either, as the earpiece speaker of the iPhone X also doubles as an external speaker, along with the bottom speaker of the device employed as well, for stereo sound. The problem isn't related to wireless either (or at least doesn't seem to be), as dback83 even mentions issues with speakerphone mode, and to date, there have been some complaints relating to this issue with the iPhone 8, as well. The same reddit thread has other users relaying their own, similar, experiences.

What's hard to gather at this point is what makes various content sound so awful. Many users are happy, or even very happy about the quality of their sound. That may lead people to believe that this could be a hardware issue, but this reddit user actually swapped their entire iPhone X with another, and the issue persisted. The issue seems to be directly related to certain types of content; specifically content with spoken word (rather than music).

This complaint isn't a brand-new one, and has persisted since just after the iPhone X launched, so hopefully Apple will address it soon and fix it. It could well be a software issue, more than a hardware one, which is a good thing. If you hit up Twitter, you'll see that the issue isn't wide-spread but it's not a rarity either, much to the chagrin of many.