Background music distorted when running on Android TV – sounds fine on PC

Hi everyone,

I'm working on a game that targets Android TV, and I’ve run into a persistent audio issue that I haven’t been able to solve.

The background music sounds perfectly fine when running on PC, but when I export to APK and run it on an Android TV box, it plays with noticeable distortion and popping sounds, similar to overloaded bass or poor speaker contact. The issue occurs even at low volume levels.

Here’s what I’ve tried so far:

Verified that the distortion is not from the TV speakers (tested with headphones – same result)

Tried both OGG and MP3 formats

Converted audio to 128kbps, 44.1kHz CBR MP3 (clean export)

Lowered the volume in both the file itself and in Construct's playback settings (down to -10dB)

Delayed playback using Wait to avoid starting too early (tried Wait 0.5 and more)

Used All preloads complete to ensure files are loaded before playback

Tried playing via different audio tags

Tested on multiple Android TV devices – same behavior

Everything else in the game runs smoothly (graphics, input, etc.) – it's just the background music that gets messed up.

Has anyone else experienced something like this with Android TV? Any tips on improving audio reliability on these devices?

Thanks in advance for any help!

I don't have an Android TV so I'll just share some things you could try.

This is the list of the supported audio formats for Android TV. You may want to try other formats that are also supported by Construct (ex: FLAC), even though Construct converts them to WebM so I don't think that would change anything.

An old issue on Github suggests that there may be some kind of issue with HRFT mode / latency hint, so you could try changing those (you can find them in the Audio object properties).

Additionaly, you could try converting the audio from stereo to mono, or EQ-ing your track to reduce sub-bass and stereo width.

You could also try and see if playing a video from Construct also has audio issues, just to make sure.