iPhone 13 Pro Bluetooth Mic Quality Terrible

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What is the problem with Apple??! I’ve owned nothing but Android phones for 20 years. Always had clean and clear voice recordings. (I worked in radio for over 30 years, so great sound quality matters to me.) But then my wife talked me into getting an iPhone 13. Surprisingly I loved it. UNTIL I recorded my outgoing voice message. What the ****??! The sound quality is about 8 times worse than a a portable cassette recorder from 1985, that’s been stored in someone’s garage for 30 years. The microphone on my iPhone 13 is GARBAGE! Honestly I expected far better quality from Apple. And they’ve not yet corrected the problem?? Unacceptable! My next phone will be an Android.

It so disappointing from apple that nobody wants to help. On the other thread https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253245874

people are also frustrated that their problem is beeing dismissed.

Regarding the airpods voice memos sounding better on android: I replied on the above thread after I was at the apple store.

I was shocked of the result! Even the apple worker said the recording on android sounds better than on iPhone!!

Where are the apple specialists here??

Thank God I finally found someone who has noticed the same issue.

I tried 5 different devices. All of them give me same poor voice recordings.

Devices I tried:

Sony wf-1000xm4

Soundcore liberty air 2 pro

Jabra elite 7 pro

Jabra elite 75t

Anker soundcore boost

With all devices the voice recording are extremely poor and low in volume.

I tried a colleagues' iPhone 13 pro and another ones iPhone 12. Same result.

Then I tried the same test on a Samsung Galaxy s10 5G and the voice recording came out crystal clear.

I guess nobody mentioned it before, because most people would think it's normal this way. But only if you compare the 2 recordings side by side you notice There's a huge problem with the iPhone Bluetooth mic recordings.

Seems like the Bitrate ist very low when you record voice messages over Bluetooth devices.

I'm on iOS 15.3 but noticed it right from the start of purchasing the phone.

Any ideas?

I don't get how come nobody talked about this?? This is a serious bug and should be addressed.

First I though maybe I'm doing something wrong since I've been long time Android User.

But no. I even tried another iPhone 8 meanwhile.. but same result. I'm quite happy with the 13 pro max but this is unacceptable for a pricetag >€1300

That was also my initial idea. Majority of apple users never experienced anything different so how would they know.

You gotta be kidding on the last part with the airpods..I gotta try it out tomorrow with my colleague

Which one of you actually took your iPhone to an Apple Store, sent it in, or took it to an AASP?

And yes, I've used other phones/devices with Bluetooth IEMs and headphones and the microphone quality was no different between the other devices and iPhones. But I did have an iPhone once that had serious BT issues including sound quality and it was replaced: Problem solved.

I planning to go to an Apple store this week. But I'm afraid they're gonna tell me to just do a factory reset or some B's like that.

We need constructive solutions.

As I said Ive tested iPhone 8, 12, 13 pro and 13 pro max. You cannot tell me it's a faulty unit. Maybe bug in iOS??

I did exactly the same voice tests with 5 different devices from different brands and got the exact same results.

I feel like more people need to be made aware of this issue because it's a major issue!

I need to find a solution for this

So I went to an apple store today and we tried the same test with another iPhone 12 and an iPhone 8 SE. -> Same results. Poor quality(muffled) of voice memo on iPhone. Much better quality on android.

Then we did the test with a pair of airpods pro and let another apple worker hear the recordings but blindly! So he didn't know which recording was made on which phone (android or apple). Without hesitation he said the android sounds better.

Then we assumed that it looks like there's a filtering/processing going on on the recording of the iPhone like when you noise cancel the background noise. On iPhone 12 you have the abilty to turn of noise cancellation but not with the iPhone 13. So we turned it off on the 12 and the sound quality of the recorded voice memo was slightly better, but not as clear as on Android.

So I didn't get any help from apple. Nobody seems to be aware of this major bug, or maybe it's a feature to sell more airpods?!

ok understood.

I'm baffled that only a small amount of people noticed this major issue since apple forced users to use bluetooth devices by removing the headphone jack.

My next idea would be to find an iPhone with an older iOS and try the voice recording on it and see how the quality turns out