Fixing the volume on my Bluetooth earbuds
blog.ornx.net
blog.ornx.net
It's pretty great except for one thing: When the battery is low or it's going to power off it announces it to you at full volume.
On a sleep mask.
I had a similarly flawed one. I had an alarm clock which had a MSF radio sync thing built in. But every time it resync'ed with the MSF time signal it'd make the same sound as the alarm for 2-3 seconds. You couldn't turn it off. This was invariably at 3AM or some horrible time. I eventually opened it up and cut the MSF antenna out and slept better knowing the clock was always slightly wrong.
years later when I long didn't use that clock as an alarm anymore, I had it in a spot where it wouldn't properly receive the DCF signal and I noticed that it would quickly lag behind after just a few days. So my theory at that point was that sometimes the clock just managed to fall behind enough in its old spot and then resync just when the alarm would've gone off, and there was no logic to account for this. ie the clock would compare the time to the set alarm exactly once a minute, but when the clock would receive a new time signal of 7:01:00 when its local time was 6:59:59 or earlier, I'd oversleep.
The super awesome feature it had was that it contained a speaker that would play the Telekom jingle every time the connection was established. This cannot be disabled and would happen at night too. So if you had a flakey connection, or used it on some other provider that still had the forced disconnect every 24 hours, it would drive you nuts pretty quickly. So I assume a lot of people took too the obvious fix to this...
German providers disconnecting customers every night is a ridiculous feature in itself. It is condescending towards customers who require to use their internet connection at night, for example because they work at night. It could lead to always-on features being broken, backups not working, and I've had countless of times where I was gaming with a German who gets DC'ed which does not work at all in competitive gaming.
In The Netherlands, yes sometimes the connection is broken at night. Sometimes, for a longer period of time. But this is because of software or hardware maintenance, and then doing such during the night makes sense as it provides the least downtime. I get that. But there is no discernible reason German providers need to disconnect every 24 hours.
It wasn't actually strictly at night, but just exactly 24h after the connection was established. But the problem was that even if you reconnected manually at a convenient time, every now and then you'd have a connection issue at a random time, and then it would keep happening at that exact time until you manually changed it again.
I'm not aware of an authoritative source for why this was the case, but most likely there must've been a technical reason like accounting, and then they just kept it around. Mind you, this only affected DSL, which at first was (apart from small regional exceptions) offered by the Telekom exclusively, and later on when resellers appeard, they had no influence on this behavior as it happened on a level where they had no access to. After a while you got consumer routers which let you choose an exact time where it would force a reconnect, so you'd at least be sure when it happened.
Ironically, when the Telekom introduced VoIP, they finally got rid of the dreaded daily disconnect, but some of the resellers kept it, like the one I'm on (cause it's cheap and otherwise rock solid). I just set it to 6 in the morning and scheduled all my backup scripts with this in mind.
While I'd have given an arm and a leg in the days of edonkey2000 for a static IP, nowadays I see the changing address as a privacy feature.
I had a different situation, I sleep with roaring fans near my head and had to turn the phone alarm way up to hear it reliably. Then it would wake the neighbor at 430am whether it woke me or not. I purchased a separate 24hr timer and set the fans to go off at 4:25am, leaving a quiet room. And a quieter alarm always wakes me. Though I am now conditioned to hear when the fans shut off and get out of bed, and hardly ever fail to turn the alarm off in time.
I just bought two new Sonicare toothbrushes and maddeningly they do this. Toothbrushes.
1. They shut down whatever audio is currently playing.
2. They take a dramatic pause.
3. They announce "BATTERY LOW. PLEASE CHARGE NOW."
4. They take one more dramatic pause.
5. Normal functioning resumes and you attempt to pick up on the thread of whatever the person you were talking to was saying for the past several seconds. This doesn't work well.
This announcement is, quite obviously, much worse than doing nothing at all. The worst case scenario, if a warning is just not given, is that my sound cuts out and I miss whatever someone was saying. But that is precisely the effect that the ear clips intentionally generate on an accelerated schedule!
There is no reason not to just add the warning into the existing audio stream. It should be an unobtrusive beep pattern or similar. That would take less than one second while not actively causing the same problem it's hoping it might potentially prevent.
(Speaking of awful bluetooth behavior that has no conceivable reason to exist, I lose all my normal computer audio whenever I'm using voice chat. Why? Well, voice chat takes input from my microphone, which switches the bluetooth device into "headset" mode. Headset mode converts stereo audio to mono and it is the only audio output you're allowed to use while you're providing audio input, or might potentially provide audio input.
Any applications that don't take audio input continue to try to play their audio to a bluetooth headphones device, which no longer exists, so they all lose the ability to make sounds.
Why is there more than one mode for the device to be in? Why would I want to lose functionality as a side effect of talking to my family? What's so difficult about playing different audio signals to each ear at the same time that the microphone could potentially become active? Non-bluetooth devices handle this and it's not even considered a notable feature. "The microphone doesn't shut down the headphones while you're using it." Why would it?)
There is a very good reason to announce it with fanfare: completely depleted batteries can get permanently damaged.
It also allows the user to plan better around the downtime. I'm actually able to continue with zero downtime on me in-ears because I detach one of them and power it up while the other one gets depleted further.
With my over-ears I'm unable to do that but they last many hours more. Which is logical as they're more bulky, have a larger battery, and don't have a case containing a battery.
> Speaking of awful bluetooth behavior that has no conceivable reason to exist, I lose all my normal computer audio whenever I'm using voice chat. Why? Well, voice chat takes input from my microphone, which switches the bluetooth device into "headset" mode. Headset mode converts stereo audio to mono and it is the only audio output you're allowed to use while you're providing audio input, or might potentially provide audio input.
True, this is silly, this also happens when you phone. But I actually don't want high quality sound when someone speaks. I've had people's background noise during gaming; not my preference. The irony is that with ANC, there's mics active all the time as noise cancelling depends on that.
This never happens, though. Every device nowadays has a controller that doesn't let the batteries deplete to a dangerous level.
it's actually better at pairing with my iphone and ipad than my apple devices, which is wild.
Product page: https://www.amazon.com/MUSICOZY-Headphones-Bluetooth-Everyth...
Speaking of loud earbuds, I might have the opposite problem. I use Bose exercise earbuds on the treadmill at what I believe is a comfortable and conservative volume, but my iPhone gives me a notification that the volume is too high and I am wrecking my hearing.
Is the phone correct? If so, I'd be willing to sacrifice a bit of enjoyment for a bit of ear health. However, there's a compelling alternative hypothesis: these earbuds have a distinctively lower physical volume at a given volume setting than others I have used, so lazy modeling on Apple's part could be expected to generate a false notification like the one I receive. I want to commend Apple if they did the right thing and built a database mapping (model,volume_setting)->physical_volume. Unfortunately, the complete lack of details in the notification and feature description do not inspire confidence and I do not want to make my workouts shittier just because Apple put a college homework quality model into production.
Does anyone here know if the data science backing these notifications is competent?
The first one is that the minimum volume on my Bluetooth earbuds is too damn loud on iOS. This is true for every third party set of headphones I have tried. People have been complaining about this online for a decade. The EU even passed a law to make them fix it (spoiler alert: it did not work).
FFS, min volume in the UI should map to hardware volume level integer one!
The second issue is that third party apps can’t expose music or podcasts via the car bluetooth media browsing menu. They can on android.
That means I can listen to podcasts and stream tidal using the jogwheel on my car with android, but not ios.
Other Bluetooth complaints:
Why does my Apple Watch blacklist car stereos?
Bluetooth is really buggy in iOS version N and N-1.
That's wild. I've never experienced anything like that -- not with AirPods or Bose or a cheap brand TOZO.
Are you sure it's not a problem with the earbuds themselves, that their minimum level is higher than it should be?
If you've dug into it, what is the range/steps of Bluetooth volume levels, and which are the range/steps that iOS supports?
Also, have you ever tried dragging the volume slider in iOS? That lets you set volume smoothly, not restricted to increments. Does that not let you set the smallest volume?
What I found that helped was to create a custom Shortcut that "Set Media volume to 1%". iOS reports that this is 48 dB when playing pink noise. I managed to hit 47 dB when dragging to volume slider on iOS below 1%, but the Shortcuts app only seems to support integer percentages.
In my case, even the 1% volume level was too high in a quiet room, but some apps have a custom EQ setting that you can use to lower the volume further. E.g. if you're using Apple Music, you can go to Settings -> Music -> EQ and pick "Loudness" to lower the volume further.
Although, come to think of it, I could probably just glue the knob into a fixed −10 dB of attenuation and then use software volume control to change the volume.
I have also noticed that those passive inline volume knobs tend to adjust the right and left channels by different levels, especially with low-impedance outputs like IEMs, but that might because the ones I've bought cost ~US$2 from AliExpress.
I could probably also fix the issue by buying a worse/less-powerful USB-C to 3.5mm DAC. The official Apple one is pretty well liked by the audiophile community, since it's powerful for the price, which is great if you have high-end headphones, but horrible if you have earbuds/IEMs.
Weirdly enough, the same Apple USB-C to 3.5mm DAC is much quieter on Android, since it defaults to a low hardware volume on the DAC, and Android then only uses software volume control to lower the volume, see https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/242221770.
I had something similar with a usb 'sound card' I was using with a mac. I had to use some DSP software to artificially reduce the sound level to about 1%, and then it was usable. Worked fine on windows as I recall. I had a similar issue with a set of logitech usb speakers; one pair worked great, so I ordered a second pair, where (on windows) the lowest output volume is tremendously loud, I couldn't get the DSP software to stick though, and ended up replacing them.
In conclusion, computers are awful.
I’ve also experienced the other issues in this thread about headsets switching modes when the microphone is activated. I had a pair of Bose noise cancelling headphones and original they worked nearly perfectly but after a firmware update the bug I updated for was fixed but it made the loopback from microphone to headphones always on. Why can’t they make any “perfect” headphones and why is this stuff seemingly so hard?
It all depends on the implementation. A $2.6 trillion dollar company could probably rummage up the spare change to buy and measure the most popular earbuds/phones -- but why do that when you can
if (volume>14) alert("You're killing your hearing!")Even if they did, it would be out of date the moment it shipped.
But no, there's no reason to believe they'd do anything like that. It would be interesting if headphone manufacturers reported the dB range when connecting with Bluetooth to enable something like that, but I've never heard of such a thing. (That is an area where Bluetooth could enable something like that, in a way that the 3.5mm jack couldn't.)
This is probably an "all of the above" situation. Implement on AirPods and push for a standard and make measurements of popular old models and have a fallback that assumes industry averages. On the scale of Apple, this is not much to ask.
Presumably the manufacturers already calibrated volume range based on the Bluetooth spec.
Noise cancelling headphones/earbuds solved this problem for me. With noise cancelling I can keep volume below 20% and have a comfortable listening experience that doesn't blow up my ears.
For me, I know the Apple notification is probably right because I started noticing ear aches after long workout sessions a few years ago. This has completely gone away after noise cancelling.
They are most likely just setting a toggle at a percentage of maximum volume level. The phone has no way of knowing what the sound pressure is at your eardrums.
You can rest easy knowing that you can ignore the warning if you think it isn't loud enough with the caveat that you could be damaging your hearing over time.
It could make a useful guess based on device identifiers. Or it could make a useless guess based on industry averages or some random device an engineer had on their desk one day. It clearly does one or the other, the question is which. Useful or useless?
Side note: The system sounds a bluetooth device makes are among the strongest differentiating factors (with some being completely awful; see https://youtu.be/J2wPsH64JEM). Yet I have never seen a review or product page which tells you about what sound (which you will have to hear multiple times per day, with no way to opt out!) the product will make.
The ability to change them also seems like a pretty easy differentiator.
Actually, one of those times was on a different bluetooth headset so it's not Aftershox specific... just the unreasonably locked down, uncustomizable nature of Bluetooth devices I guess!
Also there's an 010 Editor template for the firmware format if you're curious.
No, this is not "understandable", you paid for the product, it's a problem that should be fixed
Some of audio files sound same as what are included in partial Airoha SDKs on the Internet, but it also plays other novel voice files. If anyone is looking to independently verify/play with this result, fake AirPods might be a better path towards it.
I've come this close to taking it apart and trying to dump and probe everything, but my shaky hands are too likely to break it.
I would pay very good money for a hackable noice-cancelling headset.
https://pine64.com/product/pinebuds-pro-open-firmware-capabl... ?
> User needs to use the programming tools provided at wiki page. Any device brick caused by hacking or improper programming may void warranty.
And:
> Excessive flashing Pinebuds can potentially brick the device.
It’s hackable or it’s not, choose one.
Is there a resource-usage argument for preferring mp3?
Bluetooth headphones already need to manage several formats to decode, and the chipset that does that may also decode mp3, and mp3 is easy to work with to prepare the files.
So why does that decoding chip have mp3 decoding, and why use mp3 when you could just use SBC.
Sure, you could store those clips in a more appropriate codec, but what do you gain? It's dead simple to encode an MP3, every audio editor from the last couple decades can do it. How common is SBC support?
If MP3 decoding is free, and MP3 encoding is free, why bother spending any effort at all on anything else? Sometimes good enough is good enough and cheap and easy wins over correct every time.
The volume on my Airpod 2 are waaaaay to low on my Samsung phone.
No problem with the Airpods on an Ipad or with my Bose QC II on my mobile.
Bluetooth is such a pain.