Hello
Since I have my Pixel 6 all of my messaging partners (WhatsApp, Duo, Signal, Telegram etc) are telling me audio problems including bad quality, low volume, and not last poor speech intelligibility.
The problem happens in live call/video as well audio messages too. Since I own the phone I have received 3 updates, but non of them are fixed or changed anything on this issue.
I have started to investigate the problem and I discovered two major things. Signal loss, and hardly limited frequency range, which happens if the message gets recorded with any messaging application (including Google Duo too)
To test it I record the same audio source with the built-in recorder or WhatsApp.
The audio in the Whatsapp message gets -6dB less loud, and 6kHz above with a hard cut no Audio transmitted.
That has a significant impact on the end result of the audio and definitely doesn't help to improve the speech intelligibility.
The built-in recorder records the same source perfectly which confirms that the phone physically working well. The problem is related to the messaging applications...
It could be eg down sampling problem too.
It is obviously more difficult to understand the speech recorded with eg WhatsApp using Pixel 6 phone then any other phone.
By searching about sample rate related topics, I found an interesting statement which explains why the speech intelligibility bad on the device as in my recordings the frequency range is very narrow as higher than 5kHz starts to drop and above 6kHz no audio recorded.
"For audio, the minimum number of samples per second to unambiguously represent English speech is 8000 Hz. Using less than that would result in speech that might not be comprehensible due to a variety of reasons, one of which is how similar utterances will not be distinguishable from one another. Lower sampling rates confound phonemes, or sounds in a language, which have significant high-frequency energy; for example, with 5000 Hz, it is difficult to distinguish /s/ from /sh/ or /f/."
Listen the samples below:
Since I have my Pixel 6 all of my messaging partners (WhatsApp, Duo, Signal, Telegram etc) are telling me audio problems including bad quality, low volume, and not last poor speech intelligibility.
The problem happens in live call/video as well audio messages too. Since I own the phone I have received 3 updates, but non of them are fixed or changed anything on this issue.
I have started to investigate the problem and I discovered two major things. Signal loss, and hardly limited frequency range, which happens if the message gets recorded with any messaging application (including Google Duo too)
To test it I record the same audio source with the built-in recorder or WhatsApp.
The audio in the Whatsapp message gets -6dB less loud, and 6kHz above with a hard cut no Audio transmitted.
That has a significant impact on the end result of the audio and definitely doesn't help to improve the speech intelligibility.
The built-in recorder records the same source perfectly which confirms that the phone physically working well. The problem is related to the messaging applications...
It could be eg down sampling problem too.
It is obviously more difficult to understand the speech recorded with eg WhatsApp using Pixel 6 phone then any other phone.
By searching about sample rate related topics, I found an interesting statement which explains why the speech intelligibility bad on the device as in my recordings the frequency range is very narrow as higher than 5kHz starts to drop and above 6kHz no audio recorded.
"For audio, the minimum number of samples per second to unambiguously represent English speech is 8000 Hz. Using less than that would result in speech that might not be comprehensible due to a variety of reasons, one of which is how similar utterances will not be distinguishable from one another. Lower sampling rates confound phonemes, or sounds in a language, which have significant high-frequency energy; for example, with 5000 Hz, it is difficult to distinguish /s/ from /sh/ or /f/."
Listen the samples below:
Last edited:
