I use my iPhone 14 Pro routinely without much trouble, but every once in a while the person I am calling complains that my voice sounds too soft and distant—even when I’m speaking loudly with the phone close to my mouth. Just now an electrician I phoned said the same thing and offered to call me back. When I answered he said this time my voice sounded OK, but then after a few seconds the volume dropped again.
Anybody else have that problem or know what might cause it?
These earlier threads might help:
As I understand it, the iPhone also uses the microphone on the back of the phone, on the photo plateau, to observe any nearby noise/sound and the phone’s software tries to cancel out any distracting noise. If you are holding the phone in a way that blocks that second microphone, I wonder if it may be affecting that process.
You may also want to test some of the controls listed on this Apple support page. Maybe switching from automatic processing to standard or wide spectrum will help.
My iPhone connects to my hearing aids by bluetooth. Although you’d imagine that would affect phone output rather than input, perhaps there’s something about the connection that causes the problem.
I also notice some calls are fainter than others, which also can affect calls on landline phones. There can be multiple problems besides those mentioned so far.
One problem is that some people do not hold their iPhones properly so the microphone does not pick up the sound well. (Especially if you have a case on your iPhone it may not be obvious where the mike is.)
A second problem is built into the cellular network. If phone traffic is very heavy, the cellular network drops the data rate for each call to make more channels available, which can reduce call quality. That’s an old problem but I live near the intersection of I90 and I95 and sometimes traffic jams can cause poor phone quality or calls dropping. This can affect either end of the call; after I couldn’t understand my daughter on my iPhone one day, I called her from my landline and she came in more clearly on the iPhone she had called me on originally.