Roger Fingas
Some people are experiencing unusually bad sound quality from the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus when taking phone calls, according to complaints received by AppleInsider and shared on Apple's support forums.
One poster on Apple's forums said that phone audio sounded "distant," as if it were coming from behind the device. The complaint was echoed by several other people, most of them — including the original poster — being iPhone 7 Plus owners.
Regular audio appears to be immune. Lowering volume may mitigate the problem, but Apple doesn't yet have a permanent fix, and in fact a company community specialist simply pointed to a general troubleshooting guide for missing or distorted sound.
It's also uncertain what the root cause might be, whether hardware or software.
Since the launch of the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus last Friday, a number of buyers have encountered issues, such as hissing sounds or cellular service dropping out. None of them appear to be too severe or widespread however.
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39 Comments
The question is, is this with a headset/earpods/lightning headphones, or is this the onboard speaker/microphone.
Because it seems to me that there should be no change from the iPhone 4/5/6 in regards to call quality, especially since all operators are now using VoLTE, so unless the codec being used is ridiculously poor, it shouldn't be happening.
People who have an iPhone 7 who want to confirm this, need to make a call to a landline (wired phone), another LTE phone(iPhone 5S/6/6S,) and another iPhone 7. If it only sounds distorted in all phone calls, that sounds like some kind of decoding problem or echo-cancellation problem.
May need to further diagnose GSM vs CDMA calls which might answer Intel vs Qualcomm modem chip.
My iPhone 7 Plus sounds distinctly louder and clearer on calls than my 6 Plus plus did.
Here's an out there idea... Why not call AppleCare instead of complaining to a blog? I know that's such a hard concept to comprehend, but maybe these people should try that first. The sound quality on my iPhone 7 is awesome. I have no complaints, and if I did, I would contact Apple about it first.