Call quality and noise cancellation (regular calls, handsfree, Signal voice messages, Microsoft Teams video calls)

A temporary solution may be to disable Google from having access to the microphone if you use search function you will see quite a bit of info in regards to your issue

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Thanks, Iā€™ve raised a support ticket. Unfortunately, they want me to return the device to the reseller Galaxus where Iā€™ve ordered the phone. As I currently have no time for reconfiguring the whole device again in order to use it as a daily driver, I hope to find another solution on software side first.

My suggestion is to ask the support person to double check if this is really needed. Because many other people experience this issue and we didnā€™t get the request to return our device. Maybe he/she is not aware of this and it would probably be better for support to forward the issue to development. Because I hope itā€™s a software issue and not hardware. Because many people should return their device then.

You could perhaps send the link of this thread to support to show itā€™s not just you.

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Thanks for your help. While removing the permission for microphone and telephone did not change anything, completely deactivating the Google App did. Since I donā€™t use Google Assistant, it seems to be a sufficient workaround for me personally. Scary though that the Google App seems to interact with the microphone hardware somehow, although permissions are removed. Iā€™ll tell the support how I fixed it and that this seems to be software related. Iā€™ll also link this thread in order to raise awareness of other people also experiencing this issue.

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Deactivating the Google App was one of the first things I did after getting the FP4. Still, I have the feedback/echo issues when videocalling in Signal.

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Does any of you have experience with installing an other telephone dealer or caller. I have downloaded the dealer from Lineageos but not installed it. What do you think guys, is there any change it could solve our problem?

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This topic is quite similar to the topic below. My suggestion to @staff is to close the current topic and merge it with the one below.

The above topic also talks about Signal voice message quality. Itā€™s best to organize everything in one thread.

I sometimes record audio messages in Signal. But to have an audible recording, I basically have to speak really close to the bottom mic to make the visual audio bars in Signal register my voice.

Can someone reproduce this? To listen to my own recording, I have to put the volume of the speakers to the max and then it still sounds far away.

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It is not as extreme for me as you describe it, but yes, microphone levels are also quite low when I am sending voice messages with Telegram.

You probably did, but just to make sure: Have you checked if this problem exists when recording yourself in other apps, too? You might already know the hardware tests that you can go through when dialling * # * # 2 8 8 6 # * # *

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The builtin audio recorder is also not great. It also seems to compress the audio a lot, the quality is worse than on Signal. But the volume is low there as well.

Recording a video however seems normal.

The hardware test seems to confirm all 3 mics are working. I use the official case from Fairphone, when removed it doesnā€™t seem to make any difference either.

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Can someone test something for me please? When you use the builtin voice recorder, and you talk like you would regularly do when you record something and hold the phone at normal (reading) distance from you, does the recorder app only register one dot, at most 3, in the volume graph?

Just trying to confirm this is the behavior on all FP4 devices.

Did you change the settings in Signal? There is a setting under data and storage to reduce phonecall data and for sending media. Try to put that on high and see if the problem still exists.

I can confirm that description.

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Thanks for checking. That saves some assumptions and troubleshooting. I hope Fairphone support comes with a solution/promise to improve this.

Itā€™s amazing that Google assistent works. Because when I listen to what Google has to process itā€™s amazing it can make out the words.

Hello. Iā€™m having a similar problem, except when I try to perform the hardware tests (* # * # 2 8 8 6 # * # *), only mic 1 seems to be working. I cannot hear anything when I test mic 2 and mic 3, even if I tap or blow directly into them. Is this normal, or is it possible I might have gotten a faulty unit?

Sounds faulty but I donā€™t have an FP4
:woozy_face:

Itā€™s not normal. Tapping any mic during the test should give a response. Best is to contact FP support.

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Itā€™s funny. I can confirm that all individual microphones work.

  1. The bottom one and the top one are used when recording a video (it has stereo audio). So when I tap on the top one, it gets registered absolutely fine.

  2. And the one located on the side is used when calling on speaker. It also registers tapping just fine.

Only those HW tests seem to not detect them. Altough it looks like the hardware is absolutely fine, this behavior is weird. Iā€™ll definitely contact support, but now it seems to me more like a software issue with low gain setting in some cases.

Thanks for your responses.

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Do you go through the full test? Each mic is tested separate.