My new Nothing Ear earphones had been working great, but after a few weeks I noticed that sometimes they sounded like they were underwater. The audio would be extremely quiet and muffled. No matter how I adjusted any of the EQ settings, noise cancellation, in-ear detection, codec choice, or anything else in the Nothing app, the problem persisted. A full reset of the earphones didn’t help. I reached out to Nothing support and heard crickets to this day and decided I’d give it a week or two more before returning them.

Sometimes audio would be underwater from the very first time I turned on the earphones. But I noticed that quite often, audio would start out fine and then get instantly muffled when I locked my phone screen. I usually noticed this when listening to YT Music since that’s my most common use case for the earphones, but confirmed that other apps with audio playback also appeared to be affected.

Power saver mode? (No.)

At first I thought it might be something to do with power saver mode, which I always have on. Was power saver somehow interfering with power to the Bluetooth earbuds? But I disabled power saver and the problem persisted.

ChatGPT Android app running in the background (Yes.)

Later, I linked the issue to another potential culprit: ChatGPT Android app. I’d started using ChatGPT’s voice mode even more than usual once Advanced Voice Mode had become available to me… a few weeks after I got the earphones. I realized that when I had ChatGPT app open in the background, even when not actively using it, the earphones would often sound muffled. Force-closing ChatGPT would immediately fix my YT Music and other audio.

So if you’re also experiencing intermittent and extremely annoying underwater/muffled/low-volume sounding audio from your Nothing Ear earphones on Android, just see if ChatGPT happens to be open in the background. If it is, force-close it and see if anything changes.