Poor sound quality in phonecalls on N5
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The sound quality in phonecalls seems to be pretty poor with the nexus 5 devices (independent of the OTA). I used 3 different microphones on my first N5, then i bought a new phone, no big changes.
People complain in phonecalls that they have difficulties to understand. The sound quality is far away from 'crystal clear'.
Using the android stock image improves soundquality a lot, changing the OTAs didn't change anything. -
@htc_tattoo I don't know about your particular issue but I can say that phone calls work perfectly fine in my Nexus 5
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@htc_tattoo I have two Nexus 5. In one of them, the sound volume for phone calls is very low, with street noise I can barely hear anything. In the other Nexus 5 that I have the volume and sound quality is perfect, I have to actually decrease the volume because even with external noise it is too high.
In the first Nexus 5 that I mentioned, I also had problems with the phone signal, very often it lost connection to the network. It never connected to 4G. In the second one, I have never problems connecting to the phone network, and it connects to 4G.
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@wgarcia are both devices "Nexus 5 D821"?
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@advocatux The one where audio works perfectly, which is my daily driver, is D821. The other one I have to check , I don't have it with me right now. I will try to remember.
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@wgarcia the reason I asked is because if the device giving you troubles is a D820, that would explain them.
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@advocatux said in Poor sound quality in phonecalls on N5:
@wgarcia the reason I asked is because if the device giving you troubles is a D820, that would explain them.
D820 has known in-call sound quality problems? Maybe I shouldn't move my UT testing from OpO to N5 after all. Still haven't plugged in a live SIM, so haven't tested voice firsthand yet.
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@trainailleur D820 is set up to work with North America frequency bands, D821 is set up to work in the rest of the world. That could be the reason in this specific case (user in Europe)
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@advocatux said in Poor sound quality in phonecalls on N5:
@trainailleur D820 is set up to work with North America frequency bands, D821 is set up to work in the rest of the world. That could be the reason in this specific case (user in Europe)
Oh, okay, that's a relief.
(The signal quality I get with the OpO is abysmal under Android, hence my motivation to switch.)I could easily be mistaken, but I believe 2G and 3G connectivity is identical between the two, save for an additional UMTS band in the D820. LTE bands do differ (with poor overlap), and of course the D820 has CDMA also, which the D821 does not (though I have no idea if UT can use CDMA, and it seems uncommon in Europe anyway).
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Mine is a D821. People that i call complain that they don't listen well.
I tested with my other phone:
If i'm close to the speaker it works. Moving the speaker away (~20cm) gives a very poor sound quality. With the tested Samsung 50cm are no problem.
That's why the handsfree function does not really work. (i tried to use it while driving, but it never worked, so i had to stop to make the phonecall ;-))
Would be great if someone with android could test. -
@htc_tattoo Nexus 5 little holes for the speaker & mic are prone to keep dirt in them. After cleaning them by gently brushing with a soft toothbrush, the difference in quality and volume was pretty notable in my case (YMMV).
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@advocatux I already checked, i can see inside. Did you try to talk over the speaker with the phone an armlenth away? Does it work in your phone? Mine gets totally ununderstandable...i will check with an android version.
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@htc_tattoo yes, it works at arm's length for me
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@advocatux I checked with an audio recorder (guitar tools), works perfectly up to some meters. So it's something connected with phonecalls.
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@htc_tattoo no idea then, sorry
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@htc_tattoo on second thought, maybe you can fine tune / improve the phone sound with https://open-store.io/app/uvolman.mateosalta?
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@advocatux Thanks, but it didn't change. I tried all the settings, it changes with a audio recorder, but does not change anything while phonecalls.
Testsetup: call another phone close to you, turn off the other phones micro and listen to your speach. If you speak directly to the spaeker it's fine, if you turn the speaker a little bit away it gets disturbed.
Seems that phonecalls use the microphone differently than multimedia apps.I think i will write a bugreport as this is one of the core functions of a phone.
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@advocatux I finally remembered to check the model of my second Nexus 5, the one where sound volume is very low in phone calls, and where cell network signal very often is hard to maintain. I confirm that is is a D820, so that explains it, since I'm located in Europe.
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This low volume in calls seems to have been also a problem since the release of Nexus 5:
https://www.xda-developers.com/how-to-fix-the-low-speaker-volume-on-your-google-nexus-5/ -
@wgarcia that was a hardware problem in the first N5 batch but that glue problem was fixed, and there were some firmware updates too since then.