Poor Quality of Fairphone USB-C to Mini Audio Jack Adapter

[chrisu]

Hello,
I bought a Fairphone 4 and also the Fairphone USB-C to Mini Audio Jack Adapter.

I need the audio jack connector for various reasons.
First: Bluetooth inears do not have the sound quality I want to have. Sometimes they are good enough, but when I really want to listen to music I cannot live with the poor audio quality.
Second reason: Sometimes I take the smartphone for playback at concerts. I need audio by cable there. Same reason for some testing tasks.

So this is also the point why I am not so happy with the Fairphone adapter. The sound quality is not that good. The noisefloor is very high. There seems to be also some gating to suppress this noisefloor. This results in muted passages in songs, if they are rather silent. So there are gaps in the songs. I don’t know if this is a software issue or if it is a hardware/firmware issue of the adapter.

Is there some way make this adapter work better. Or is there an alternative for a really high quality adapter?

[mde]

Welcome to the forum.

You could start by checking out this list:

FP4 List of USB-C to 3.5 Audio jack adapter

ATTENTION!! This wiki is just a list by FP4 users. It is there to share experience with USB-C to headphone jack adapters. It is nothing official by Fairphone. Fairphone sells an adapter as well: USB-C to Mini Audio Jack Adapter (3.5mm) - Accessory | Fairphone There is already some information in the following thread, please use this thread for metadiscussion All posters of this thread are invited to update or specify the information or add anything new. This is a wiki, so everyone can edit…

There is also a discussion here:

Best USB-C to Audio Jack Adapter for FP4

Hi there, so there is a lot of controversy about Fairphone dropping the 3.5mm audio jack, like here: As it often gets mentioned, we can just use a USB-C to audio jack adapter. I will need one, because I still use the 3.5mm jack. Among other reasons, a lot of small bluetooth headphones don’t have the battery capacity I require. I would like to collect some ideas for good adapters. I did not order the “official” adapter along with my FP4, because it beeing out of stock made me unsure: USB-C to…

[anon9989719]

Hi and welcome to the forum.

There are a number of topics and posts that deal with clipping of input volume resulting in unsatisfactory recording ~ this occured with the FP3 without any adapter ??

However see if you can try the adapter elsewhere as my suspicions lean to the phone’s software in trying to stop input overloads.

Very low quality audio recordings

I made a video comparing the sound of a song with the default Camera app VS Open Camera (with different audio input settings): Default audio is good when simply talking to the phone, but absolutly not when singing or playing music. But, as @corvuscorax pointed, “unprocessed” audio usually needs to amplify the gain to get a decent/normal audio level (I found that you can do it easily in Audiofix, but it would be really nice if you can choose the entry level or a kind of auto input level). May…

Microphone Clipping

Hi, welcome to the forum! When the Fairphone 3 was released it had a bug that applied a kind of noise reduction filter to videos recorded with the default camera app. At that time I recorded a video to show it, in which I compared the original recording with a recording made with the Open Camera application (F-Droid or Play Store) and with two different settings. You can watch it here: [Fairphone 3 - Audio comparison when recording music videos] I haven’t used Open Camera for a wh…

Automatic audio ducking in videos

Thanks for your reply and suggestions I’ve just tried Open Camera and Audio Recorder. The audio on Audio Recorder is very good with hardly any loss of quality and certainly no ducking/automatic noise reduction. However, the results on Open Camera seem pretty much the same as the standard camera app. My wife ordered a Fairphone 4 at the same time as me and we tried using her phone in the same way in case it was my phone that was at fault, but hers returned the same results: a ver…

Issues with sound recordings

Hello @all, I have serious problems with sound recordings on my new FP4. (BACKGROUND I am a journalist and occasionally have to do sound recordings that are used in a professional way, so I have some experience doing this with different smartphones). I’m sorry to put it that way but the onboard sound app of the FP4 is utter rubbish: catastrophic sample rate and no way to change that … alas, no settings at all So I tried different apps (i.e. “Audio Recorder” from g…

[chrisu]

My problem is the audio out not the audio in

[chrisu]

Thank, I did not find the second discussion.

I tested the adapter with my computer and again it is a real noise generator compared to the build-in audio jack.

Maybe I will look if I can buy the Anker enywhere or I will give another one a try.

[chrisu]

I tried this adapter:
https://www.reichelt.de/usb-c-audio-adapter-digital-shvp-bs14-05021-p270804.html

The noise floor is significantly lower.

The noise floor can still be heard if you are in a silent environment, but nothing to compare with the fairphone adapter. Probably one reason why I am more sensitive to the noise is the type pf ear phones: I often listen with Sennheiser CX300 II which have a very high sensitivity. So often I listen on the lowest volume step (i.e., silent and then pressing volume up once).
With low-sensitivity earphones the noise problem will be less pronounced.

However, the Fairphone adapter has a further disadvantage: The noise gate (probably a "feature to compensate for the very high noise floor). So silent passages are muted completely, e.g. intros, silent text passages and so on. This is not the case with the new adapter.

[jcpx]

Hello,
I bought the usb to mini jack adapter for my fairphone 4
Nevertheless, the sound keeps on coming from the cellphone speaker; it is not redirected to usb-c

Is there any setting to put in the configuration to use the usb-c to mini-jack adapter?
Nothing seems to be recognized in the USB-C menu.

Thank you in advance

PS: I purchased the adapter on fairphone website. so I assume there is no compatibility issue.