Hi everyone, I bought myself an Amazon Warehouse Pixel 6a during Black Friday. GrapheneOS with sandboxed Google Services has been really reliable for me. I had no issues with banking, navigation, food delivery apps and the like, which I unfortunately need when I am in a different city.

I was in the train and I noticed that my wired headphones with a USB-C dongle were picking up (sometimes a lot of) digital noise from the antenna. The most of it was when 4G was jumpy or low, but also when playing back a youtube video in streaming. The dongle should be fine because it worked fine with other devices (with 4G and not) without any noise.

I don't know if it's related, but also the microphones on the phone capture some buzzing when charging the phone, but with this I can live.

Did you notice anything similar?

I am considering returning the phone, but I have been really pleased with it so far if not for this issue with wired headphones, which I would like to use instead of bluetooth. I fear that this is a design issue rather than a defect, and searching for a new phone after Black Friday is also not the best for pricing.

SteaminWasbeer changed the title to Digital noise on wired headphones .
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Sorry to hear that. Having the same phone I do not experience neither of those things.
Buzzing when charging sounds strange. I would test it with other charger (or cable)

7 days later

Ultimately I stumbled upon this thread in the forum and it turns out that the dongle itself is the problem. I also found out that it seems to capture interference from nearby devices in general, and I think the train situation was a really evident one.

The microphone buzzing I could not reproduce, but maybe it was WhatsApp's fault because that's where I heard it first. WhatsApp does compress the audio so maybe it's that?

Either way I will need to find a better dongle. Mine was the Meizu mblu Hi-Fi dongle, which had nice reviews overall, but I would not recommend it at this point.