Responding to my own post... It was like midnight when I 'discovered' this, and this morning I decided to reboot my phone and then try again. The audio seems normal now. 🙄 I will be paying attention to this close now.
Wondering if there's any setting that adjusts the max volume (like night mode). I wish I had tried before rebooting, but I was just drinking my first cup of coffee haha.
I did go into developer settings last night and disabled the audio sync. "Disable absolute volume" and that didn't seem to change anything. (I did not try to raise the volume on my buds after I was at max on phone though)
I've never noticed this 'issue' before. However I realize I did just copy a bunch of crap to this phone, install updates, etc... I'm also having some weird tasker behavior where it is randomly crashing. That was actually the driver of the reboot this morning as I had updated/toggled some permissions that didn't seem to be sticking.
I had that with my bt speaker. What helped is to get both devices to 100% when the music is playing. That guaranteed that both devices were on their actual maximum
Well, to each his own... I should get $699 for my 8pro as trade-in and already got a $200 store credit. I've actually been waiting for the Pixel Buds Pro 2's and by going with the Pixel 9 I am getting $900 "off" those purchases.