Given that there was a recent review on German golem.de which complained about the audio quality of calls, I was very curious about it. I have an L5 Evergreen with byzantium flashed onto it.
The easy part first: Incoming sound quality was pretty good right away from the start. No need to tweak anything.
The harder part: Outgoing sound quality. My wife complained I would sound quiet and “somehow muffled” with noise in the background (despite being in a quiet environment). The volume sliders in the graphical settings app seemed turned up, so more fiddling was in order. But I was quite scared to turn the wrong knob and turn the wrong volume up/down, ending up with a dsyfunctional phone of my own doing. (There are quite many of these knobs!)
So the package alsa-utils
to the rescue, it contains alsamixer
, and alsactl
which I needed. First, thanks to a suggestion by Guido Günther, I stored all my values in a file, so I could restore them later to the original ones in case I screwed up. The commands to save all values to a plain text file and to later restore them if needed are:
alsactl store -f alsa.conf
alsactl restore -f alsa.conf
OK, being on the safe side, I turned to alsamixer
which provides a nice interface on the console.
Protip, doing this through ssh from a real computer lets you a) nicely use the keys to navigate, b) provides a large enough screen to see stuff and c) lets you make test calls WHILE you remotely turn up/down the volume on the L5
In the end it turned out that I needed to:
alsamixer
F6 (select soundcard) -> choose "0 Librem 5" (I could have started it with alsamixer -c 0 for the same effect)
F4 (show only Capture devices)
Navigate to "Digital" (the 9th column from the left) which was quite low and boost it up to 100%.
My wife understands me much better now!