iPhone voice quality

By Stuart360, 28 September, 2012

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

Last night, I received a call from a friend who was using her iPhone. The voice quality was muffled & muddy. There was so little frequency information that my friend didn't even sound like herself.
She was on the Verizon network.
In contrast, calls on Nokia Simbian phones sound crisp & clear.
So do calls from my roommate's 5 year old $20 Tracfone.
Do all 3 US networks sound this bad when making calls on iPhones?
I love my iPod Touch, but I am not willing to pay hundreds of dollars in order to make sub-standard sounding phone calls.
I was disappointed to learn that the iPhone 5 will not support voice over LTE as implemented on Sprint's network.
Any thoughts?

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Comments

By MarkSarch on Monday, October 22, 2012 - 19:20

Hi I'm not sure about your previous post! That you said: I was disappointed to learn that voiceOver will not support LTE in Sprint Network. Can you post the link or from where did you get the information? IPhone 5 users from Sprint Network, where the 4G LTE is able to use, could you confirm this guys? http://newsroom.sprint.com/article_display.cfm

By Lisa on Monday, October 22, 2012 - 19:20

I don't think voiceover has anything to do with support for LTE. The type of network you're on doesn't affect voiceover.

Here is a link to an article from Fierce wireless. http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/verizon-sprint-wont-support-simultaneous-voicedata-iphone-5/2012-09-14

I am not speaking about Voiceover the screen reader. I am speaking of VoLTE, a new standard for voice communication. Sprint says that their version of VoLTE is not compatible with the iPhone 5. I still claim that voice quality on calls from low tech cell phones such as the Jitterbug is good, while calls placed from iPhones sound terrible. Does this very from network to network?

By MarkSarch on Monday, October 22, 2012 - 19:20

Smartphones and Devices News Wireless Carrier News Verizon, Sprint won't support simultaneous voice/data in iPhone 5. Hi thanks for the link. This is-not new for the CDMA Networks (Sprint and Verizon). In others words CDMA users couldn't talk and use data in the sane time. Nothing to do voiceOver that's screen Reader and 4G LTE that's the Laters Data speed. But this is not only with the iPhone 5 if not even some 4G LTE devices. May be are you talking about NFC? This is a new feature that will be included later just in few devices and not all carriers. Personally I like the voice clear cuality between iPhones.2

Hello. I have t-mobile and the iPhone voice quality is really good. The iPhone 4 and earlier had absolutely crap call audio. I say the 5 and 5s have some of the best call quality yet on an I device. I hope this helps.

Hi. I started out my iPhone career on a 3GS on AT&T. As i went to the four and sayed until the five, my father, who was on verizon, is, sorry, and a friend who is also using ATT had trouble hearing me, but I heard them just fine. Insert lame can you hear me now? joke. So when I upgraded, as well as to save money I switched to verizon. I don't have as much signal strength, two bars out of five, which I'd like better, but those are storng enough I'm having no problems. And the other commenters are right, you can't alk and surf on verizon or Sprint. I'm also sad I have to give up my unlimitted data. I've noticd that the ear buds don't always provide good quality so I use just my phone itself. It sounds like you might be one of those audio people who dislike things that aren't perfect. Just my oppinion.

By Carlos Alonso on Tuesday, October 22, 2013 - 19:20

I just switched from an iPhone 4 on AT&T to an iPhone 5S on T-Mobile, the voice quality on phone calls is very noticeably improved, not sure whether the phone or the carrier makes the difference.

By Cliff on Tuesday, October 22, 2013 - 19:20

Hi all! Just wanted to throw in a quick tip for those of you who's not aware of this. To check your networks signal in a more accurate way, to check if it's the signal strenght that's bugging you, you can always use the iPhone Field Test. Just open the phone app, then the keyboard and type in: *3001#12345#* and then hit call. You'll now bring up the iPhone Field Test screen, which has a lot of information that I have yet to figure out. But the handy part, is that the bars that shows the signal strength on the left side of the status bar, has now changed to a number, with a minus sign in front of it. This is a much more accurate number than the 5 bars can give you, and you can also use it when calling your carrier to complain! Here's how it works: The lower the number, the better is your signal. You'll never get anything lower than -40, and that's the theoretical signal you may get when standing right beside a network base station. But considering that 5 bars is equal to around -80, you can get much more information from this. I think 2 bars is somewhere around -100, and above -100 you will find that your voice begins dropping out and making wierd noises while on a phone call. -110 is the place where the whole phone calls starts dropping out and you'll have to constantly try to call your conversation partner back, even though you'd probably not have any good luck doing that. At around -120 - -130 the network announced will fall out, and "No service" will appear in stead in the status bar. That's it, a lot more accurate information to get from this hidden iPhone feature than the common signal bars. Oh, and a last tip: If you want this to stick in your status bar, so that you can always switch between signal strength in bars or this number, which I believe is given in dBm's, you can do this: While the Field test screen is open, hold down the Sleep/On/Off-button until the slide to turn off appears. Then, don't slide to turn off the phone, but hold the home-button down for a few seconds, to force quit the field test app, and return to the home-screen again. Now you can double-tap the area in the statusbar where the signal strength is shown to switch between this dbm-number and the more common known bars. Just thought I'd throw it in here, but it just occurred to me that this might be in more use in the Guides section of this site. So if anyone in the AppleVis editorial team wants to move this to the guides section, well, I won't stop you! :) Just don't have the time to repost this myself right now! Hth anyone! All the best :)

By alex wallis on Tuesday, October 22, 2013 - 19:20

Hi, just out of interest is there a way to get wifi bars to show as a number like network signal? I have been able to do this, but only because when jailbroken I installed a tweak called sbsettings which gave me an option to set wifi bars to a number. Luckily this setting continues to work across iPhone backups and even though I am now on an unjailbroken phone it still works. But it would be nice to know of a proper way to set the wifi bars to a number that doesn't depend on the setting from a jailbreak tweek still working.