Note 10+ audio crackling and distortion

[Dezzy]

Hi. I purchased a Samsung note 10+ a few months ago. After about a week I noticed that it would make crackling/distorted noises when notifications come in, it's the same when I play music or videos. However, after awhile it goes away and comes back again intermittently. Only once was it really serious and lasted for a bit longer than usual. 
I went to the shop a few days ago and asked the technician, he said that it's most probably software problem and asked me to do a hard reset. 

I have done the following: 

Restart in safe mode 

Hard reset

Wipe cache partition

Speaker cleaner app

Nothing worked. I noticed that it happens 95% of the time in air conditioned rooms/cold rooms especially after the phone being idle for some time. Like when I wake up in the morning in air conditioned rooms. 

[BandOfBrothers]

A phone can be affected by different temperatures @Dezzy  but I wouldn't think the temperature created by air conditioning would affect it. You can check out what temperatures Samsung say can affect the phones by looking on their website or Google searching.

There is a diagnostic tool on the phone however.

Please go over to your dial pad and type in *#0*#, this will bring up a number of tests.

You can check the speakers from there.

The engineer you spoke to were they authorised Samsung Authorised engineers ?

If this continues then I'm thinking this is a hardware problem.

If you have some Samsung Experience Store  / Samsung Service Centres close to you then wait for them to re open after the COVID-19 pandemic ends and they'll do a diagnostic.

🌈 Stay Safe  🌈 

[Dezzy]

It really is peculiar as it doesn't happen in room temperature places. I assume it's hardware problem, the technician didn't open up the phone to check. I'll probably have to request for a replacement if it's a faulty device. I ran the diagnostic tool that you suggested and the speaker was fine (in room temperature setting). This morning it was crackling when I was in my air-conditioned bedroom like many other times it crackled. 

[BandOfBrothers]

Certainly is a conundrum @Dezzy 

Do let us know how you get on please.

🌈 Stay Safe  🌈 

[Dezzy]

Yeah will do. Will get it to the service centre when the service centres reopen. Till then, stay safe!

[txking]

any resultion on this? I'm having the same problem as well

[Dezzy]

Sadly no. I sent it for fixing but thet could bot find the problem (apparently the problem didn't occur the whole week they used the phone for testing). The moment it was sent back to me it happened again the next day. So I requested for a replacement. Does yours also occur only in cold rooms? Might be a faulty device after all.

[dfreezy]

Its not a hardware problem thankfully. I know this because it has never happened on this or my previous note 10+ until recently. I think it started after last update. I've tried many things and it won't go away. It does seem to be related to the radio, but to test this I need to play downloaded tracks and disable all radios but Bluetooth. I build and train the ML models for a platform that is part of Samsung Virtual assistant so I'm going to go through customer queries and see if I see a significant rise after any updates and see if there is a lot of volume. we need to figure the out though, It's horrible not being able to use this phone for music

[RomainRR]

I just got back my Note 10 from the technical service just because of that. To no avail!!!

[RomainRR]

It's just so frustrating! And at the Samsung technical service they seem not to know what the problem is. I've sent the telephone twice already. The very moment I get it back it works alright. But then, after some time the crackling starts again. The Note 10 isn't exactly a cheap phone. This is starting to defy my brand loyalty!!!