Over the weekend my daughter came to me with a problem: One of her airpods wasn't as loud as the other. After asking her if she'd done some obvious first steps--had she disconnected and reconnected them, had she rebooted her phone, both of which got me a groan that said "of course"--I sat down with her to try to get to the bottom of it.
First stop was a Google search, which in 2026 brought up an AI-generated summary of some helpful advice, which read:
If one AirPod is quieter, first check and adjust the Audio Balance slider in your iPhone's Settings > Accessibility > Audio/Visual to the center, then perform a deep clean of the speaker mesh on both AirPods, and if issues persist, try a full reset of the AirPods and restart your device. 1. Check Audio Balance (Most Common Fix)
Go to Settings > Accessibility > Audio/Visual.
Find the Balance slider and ensure it's centered (at 0.00).
If it's off-center, move the slider towards the quieter AirPod to even out the volume.
2. Clean Your AirPods
Remove the ear tips (for AirPods Pro).
Carefully inspect the speaker and microphone mesh on both AirPods for debris, earwax, or lint.
Gently clean them with a dry, soft-bristled brush or a cotton swab to remove blockages.
Not wanting to trust a predictive text system with delusions of grandeur, I checked the links those results were pointing towards, and because they were all Apple Support pages I went directly there for help. They...said the same thing, that's why Google had pulled those answers for the AI result. We tried all of them, right down to the cleaning, and none of them worked.
So I decided to ask the same question but point the search towards Reddit, and was given a post called "My left AirPod is much quieter than my right. How do I fix it?". That was exactly our problem, so I clicked the link, checked the top reply and it was someone saying..."Suck on the one with low sound".
User MarbledCats didn't say where to suck on it, but it looked like the bit with the speaker mesh that goes inside the ear was the only place that made sense, so I wiped the outside of it, closed my eyes, shut out the sound of my daughter saying "oh my God what are you doing" and sucked. Then I sucked again, just to be sure. To paint the picture of a grown man sucking on a tiny white plastic earbud, it wasn't a huge toke, just a couple of puffs. I had no idea why exactly I was doing this, what this was supposed to achieve or how it was all working, but MarbledCats had been upvoted for this advice, so it was worth a shot.
Wiping down the earbuds again--I felt bad for them, they were never designed for this kind of bodily fluid exchange--I handed them to my daughter, she hit PLAY on Spotify and hey. Problem solved. The volume was back, they were working perfectly, and she went away happy.
I'm still not sure what I actually did. Comments under MarbledCats' post suggested that the shock of a suck hitting those confined spaces would separate any wax or dirt that were sitting on the earbud's drivers--and which would have been covering them, muffling the sound–knocking them loose. Maybe that's the case, I don't know, all I know is that I followed the advice and it worked.
Perhaps the more pressing question you've got beyond how it worked is why did I follow that advice in the first place? Sucking on an earpod sounds like prank advice, gross shit, something a kid on Reddit would post just to fuck with me. But when I followed the link and saw responses like this, I just had to try it.
Add me to the list of people saying "wow I thought this was joke and it worked wtf".
It felt good to have fixed my kid's problem, sure, but it felt even better to have had yet another moment to cherish that despite tech's best efforts to cram AI into every facet of our lives against our will, in ways that make daily tasks pointlessly more difficult and in cases like this actively worse, a bunch of people had got together to try some weird shit and it worked, and were sharing that information for the benefit others, in a way the plagiarism lake boiling machine's best efforts could never.
