L5 call audio quality

Hardware Librem 5
1

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! :heart:

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2

How do you do that, can you choose byzantium already when flashing, or you flash the default way first and upgrade to byzantium afterwards?

3

This is worth every trouble with the command line! :wink:

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4

https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Development_Environment/Phone/Troubleshooting/Reflashing_the_Phone.html

 ./scripts/librem5-flash-image --dist byzantium
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5

L5 developers @dos already fixed the issue “sound quiet and “somehow muffled” with noise in the background” on amber as far i know.

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PulseAudio version in Byzantium doesn’t contain the patch needed to adjust the parameters of the echo-cancel module yet, so it’s expected: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/-/merge_requests/400

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7

Did you say “Can you hear me now?”

8

Don’t you mean she HEARS you much better? Understanding is something completely different…lol

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Of course you can’t understand a person well if you can hear them well, so it seems logical to me.

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10

I think the internet/sarcasm filter is on…lol. I was attempting to make a joke.

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11

Obviously he is not married…

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12

The classical way to test calling quality is: “Das Pferd frisst keinen Gurkensalat.”

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13

Or ZPF1 to 5

14

I am really at a loss with the call audio quality. People complain about poor sound from my side most of the time, sometimes it the person at the other end can’t make out what I am saying at all. Complaints vary between “you sound very distant”, “you sound muffled or like you are sitting in a box”, “are you on a construction site?”, “your mic seems to pick up every background noise” etc. etc.

The problems appear both with and without the Librem5 headphones and I just can’t seem to find any mic setting that works consistently and reliably. I tried the alsamixer suggestion in this thread, but no consistent improvement.

Shouldn’t there be a default mic setting that just works? As it is now, I am constantly experimenting with different input levels of the mic, but can’t find what produces an acceptable outgoing call audio quality.

15

I have heard similar complaints from people I talked to on my Librem 5.

What is needed I think is some systematic testing, which I have not had time to do yet. One idea is to use a voicemail service that can record the sound from calls, then call that and play a specific sound into the mic using some other phone and then do the same thing using the Librem 5, then compare those two recordings. Find a case where the Librem 5 performs poorly compared to other phones and then investigate that case further. I will try something like this if/when I have time, unless someone has better ideas.

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16

It sounds like it’s “every case.”

17

I’m pretty sure there are some cases that are worse than others. In particular regarding background noise, I suspect that the Librem 5 does not manage to remove background noise as successfully as many proprietary software driven phones.

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Note that using the headphones still uses the internal mic as far as I know. As the phone doesn’t yet support the headset mic yet.

19

So, selecting the “Headset Microphone - built in audio” with headphones connected effectively mutes the phone then? And does that mean I have to leave at “Internal microphone” to be able to talk to someone?

20

Here’s what I see in the sound settings with a phone received just this week:

  • plug in a headset and the output automatically switches to “Headphones” – which work
  • at the point the input still shows “Internal Microphone” – which works according to its meter
  • but now you have the option to select “Headset Microphone” – which does not work.

Tried both the headset shipped with the phone and my old one which is in daily use.

Sounds like someone know that “Headset Microphone” is a mute setting, and avoided automatic switching to have at least some microphone, though not the one you think you are using.

Might add: I switched the SIM back to my old phone because the other end couldn’t hear / understand me well … now I know why.

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