iPhone 5 bad call voice quality

There is an AT&T app in iTunes that lets you tell AT&T about your call quality. Search for "Mark the Spot" in the App store. It also has tips for improving connections.

It also locates AT&T WiFi hot spots.

Obviously my post wasn't ridiculous because it fixed my friend's audio problem on her iphone 5.

Get a life geek!

Not everything needs to be complex.

Same darn problem. I can hear eveyone clearly but I sound muffled and soft to everyone else. Going to return the phone to Verizon tomorrow. Kinda a crappy way to get my xmas present.

My Finance HATES her iPhone 5 on ATT for the call quality issues! My ATT iPhone 5 black-32Gb seems just a little better than hers (white 16Gb).

She wants her old 4 back, but we sold it to Gazelle, and we're locked in now.

Apple did replace her first iPhone 5, then ATT replaced the SIM, and no improvement! The 'genious' at Apple Store was a bit of an *** about it too, like we were trying to get a new phone to replace the 2 week old one for no reason!!!

People can't hear her frequently. And she OFTEN can't hear me... enough that she now hates talking on the iPhone.

I'm with the others here, I have all the Apple toys... ALL of them. But, if this iPhone5 can't perform as a phone first and foremost, then I'll be looking at Android next contract.

Fixed mine and my daughters as well. We were told (by Best Buy) we could leave the protection film on until we got a "real" screen protector and perhaps some others have been misinformed as well. Thanks for your post.

By the way. I have a Griffin Survivor case. Wonderful case for backcountry skiing and climbing, but for the life of me it seems to render the Phone part of the IPhone5 totally unuseable. Calls sound like Alexander Graham Bell trying to get through to Watson.

I note all the 'protective film' comments above, and I found it hard to believe that a cover on the front of the IPhone5 would leave it non-funtional as a phone.

However, if I take the plastic front cover off my Survivor case, it seems to work better - but then it is no longer doing its job of protecting my $800.00 phone.

What gives?

I had this same problem 32 gb iphone 5. Also have 2 other iphone 5's both 16 gb's and they sound clear as day. Took it to Verizon and the employee noticed it within 2 secs of using the cell phone. She then processed a return and my phone is on the way tomorrow next day air. Its the speaker than was going bad on my phone. It speakerphone and headphones its sounds perfect. But using it normally through the ear speaker it sound robotic and muffled like the speaker doesnt have good contact to the circuit board.

FWIW my blog post on this topic still seems accurate:

http://tech.kateva.org/2012/12/voice-call-audio-clipping-and-dropouts.html

There are several different complaints on this thread, but the most common one is the clipping problem. To me it seems more compression artifact than noise cancellation but of course the two are related.

In any case there's no point in replacing your phone for this problem, the phone is working correctly. The bug is between the 5 and some towers.

A partial fix is to turn on hearing aid mode and don't use the wired headset. I do this when call quality is really bad, typically on a VOIP converence call. Otherwise we wait for Apple to fix this.

I'm pretty sure they know what the problem is.

My speaker also had issues.

I bought 3 iPhone 5's at the same time and while I thought I had issues with all 3, it turns out that my phone was the problem. I still think the issue is much more than the speaker alone however, or compression or noise cancellation.

Before I took my phone back the the apple store to have it replaced, not only did I have problems hearing my caller, but they also had a hard time understanding me as well. So when I was calling the other 2 iPhones, it appeared that they were all bad, but it was only my device. I will say that I instantly noticed an improvement after getting another device as well did my callers, however, the new "working" phone didn't solve ALL the issues with voice quality. I would say that it's about a 70% improvement as my phone was indeed defective, but I still hear compression in the signal and it's nearly impossible to make out converstions where multiple people are in the background making comments to me or to the person on the other end of the call.

I hope that Apple will continue to work on resolving the other issues and make the voice quality itself better and work further on their attempt of drowning out ambient noise. There are actually many times during a call that it's actually desired to hear ambient voices in the background versus the inaudible digital noise that it produces while trying to cancel the noise completely.

We have the same poor voice quality issues, too. After reading the comments, I realised that I didn't take off the screen protector, we took it off and it works perfectly, good luck to everyone and thanks to the reminder comments on screen protector.

Thanks for the suggestion graemeR. It makes sense. I took off my survivor case and others were still having issues hearing me. It may be an issue with some, but maybe it's the HD voice for others...

So I read in the Mac Rumors forums that the tape on the Survivor Cases may be the cause of the poor voice quality. So, I'm going to try this since it was an easy fix, and maybe look to return the phone if it doesn't work this week. The prior survivor cases for the 4/4S had holes, and this one has tape... Maybe to help with water issues. I tested this am and it seemed to work better, but there was some robotic sounds/echoes at first. This may be a function of Verizon's updates to HD voice which aren't fully implemented. I have read online about this to be possibly fully implemented by sometime later this year.

I had never heard about Verizon and other companies having trouble updating their system for the iPhone 5 until now. Good thought. Check this out. Applies to AT&T too.

http://www.idownloadblog.com/2012/09/13/sprint-verizon-att-no-iphone-5-hd-audio/

I'm surprised the Apple folks didn't mention this when they gave me my 4th new iPhone 5. Maybe they're not allowed to. I hope this gets fixed.

Apple may not have an official policy on it since it really isn't their "fault." I think you're right, though since it would save them a lot of money and hassle if it is simply a function of a some people with protective films/ cases and the carriers not upgrading yet fully to HD voice. I think we may be able to surf and talk once they upgrade the LTE networks fully... Who knows for sure. That's how I found some of the info on the HD voice since I was curious why Apple didn't address the request to surf and talk at the same time which some Android phones already do.

Maybe Apple needs to start talking more to the carriers.

This is definitely not a case of protective film covering some sort of non-existent microphone.

There are three mics, one right next to the ear piece, one next to the main (back) camera, and one on the bottom of the phone. Everything else you're seeing are proximity sensors.

We have 3 iPhone5's on Verizon and all of them suffer from the stuttering, robotic, drop out characteristics and also an overall lack of fidelity (all midrange with no presence in the high end or definition of lower midrange frequencies). We switched out one of these iPhone5s at the Apple store (that turned out to be a refurb) and it appears the quality improved a lot versus the originals. While not perfect, there is a noticeable difference especially in fidelity.

My guess is that overall on this thread, the issues are a combination of things; lack of HD-voice technology on Verizon's (and AT&T's, Sprint's) network, noise cancellation issues (hardware and/or software) and compression algorhithms (Apple's software). Whatever it is, there is no excuse for Apple/Verizon not to acknowledge and address these serious issues. Call quality on the original iPhones5s that we still have are completely unacceptable and borderline acceptable on the replacement iPhone 5 refurb we got.

Apple, are you listening? Hello???