IOS 11 Sound Problem

In Settings/General/Accessibility/Phone noise cancellation is on by default.

I tried to set it to off and the next call went through fine.

OK, so I just had an appointment at the Genius bar.

They ran some diagnostics on my phone and put it on a dock and ran some audio dignostics (which checks all the mics and speakers and sensors etc)

Everything came back as normal. They confirmed there was no issue with hardware and it's most likely a software bug which has been introduced via some sort of edge-case config. Possibly beta software related, possibly app related. Who knows.

The advice is to do a full factory reset as the next action step. I'll do that this weekend and report back if there's any improvements.

So the issue has finally gone away for me after doing a full factory reset.

I didn’t restore from a backup and set things up as a new iPhone.

I’ve been slowly installing apps as I need them as I suspect that a rogue app was causing the issue.

So far I have all the usuals installed:

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, WhatsApp, Slack, Amazon, Banking apps, eBay,.....

No issues so far so all these apps can be ruled out as being the culprit.

If the issue comes back I’ll try and recall what the last installed app was and report back.

Hopefully this is helpful info.

In Settings/General/Accessibility/Phone noise cancellation is on by default. Turning it off solved the problem for me.

I experience similar issue after upgrading to 11.1 – outgoing audio is extremely low.

I contacted Apple Support, they confirmed that they don’t hear me :-) and denied that it’s a software issue.

Then the suggested Settings reset. Didn’t help.

However, I found:
Loudspeaker mode somewhat works. External microphone works.

It is somehow related to the cover (generic thing that doesn’t cover any of the ports or speakers), since when I take it off, it’s way better, when it’s on, the other side can not hear me. Yes, it was on for fourteen days before the iOS 11 upgrade and there was no problem.

Possibly there is an issue with echo/noise cancellation?

After updating IOS to 11.0.2 I cannot make or receive any phone calls on my iPhone 6s.

Messenger and other voice communicator works fine.

EDIT: After reseting network settings everything went back to normal. Still - really uncool adventure just after OS update.

I think I have a possible solution:

1. Go to Settings
2. Telephone
3. WLAN-Calls (Dont know what the exact translation is like)
4. Turn it off

Since I turned it off, the problem is gone (now since 24 hours and a lot of calls!)

Hi there.

I had the exactly the same issue & I went down to the Apple store and they fixed it on the spot. Dust & dirt build up in the receiver speaker after them having 2 goes at cleaning it.

Alright I've updated to iOS 11.2 and everythings back to being Perfect. Every bug I've noticed has been fixed. Amazing.
Now I can make calls and voice memos and screen recordings and my voice is clearly audible.

And Screen Recordings audio is available when imported to iMovie- not like before. And no lag or hiccups on my SE. Smooth as butter.

And on another note- audio from Airpods seem louder now at max volume.

Same issue here since latest iO11+ upgrade on iPhone 6.

One thing I have noticed that predicts the issue being present (while making or receiving a cellular call), is that the side volume buttons seem to stop working. At least, the visual doesn't appear on the screen to show what level your speaker is set to. A reboot fixes this and the sound issue. Obviously a software bug.

I read on another post about this same problem that if they turned off AirDrop and then did a hard reset it fixed the problem. I have now done it and will wait and see if this fixes it. I normally use AirDrop to transfer photos to my Mac, but I'll live without it if this fixes this problem. AirDrop settings can be found under Settings > General > AirDrop. Set to Receiving Off. Do a hard reset.

If you look on the Voice Memo interface - top right, there's an audio icon. If you press this, the playback (on the phone) is more audible...

Funny, I just tried this out earlier, and the crash happened again. There were some non Apple app's open in the background that froze up the machine too. Needed to soft-reset. Thinking the culprit could be among them (WhatsApp for example).

And the audio issue is actually this: earpiece speaker and mic become disabled by the bug – so you can't be heard during a call, or hear the caller. The speaker still works as sounds (and the phone ringing) aren't affected.

It can't be a hardware issue (phone killed by iOS 11 update) as a re-boot (or soft-reset) resolves this – albeit temprarily.

I can pretty much confirm that the issue is fixed in iOS 11.2 Public Beta 2 (although no mention of it being an issue in the first place in any release notes).

I'm now on Public Beta 3 as of this morning but not made any calls yet so hopefully there hasn't been any regression in this release.

It's worth making a Genius Bar appointment and getting them to run a diagnostics on your phone. Chances are it will come up clear but at least Apple will get another support case about this issue which will help bring it to the table of the engineers.

[correction edit]

Hey guys I found a way to just improve the voice volume for the receiving end - but it doesn't fix the voice drowning out - disable VOLTE and it should work fine - albeit at a lower and poor voice quality but at least louder

My phone is on VZW, and as many of you have observed, if you speak or hum~~ at the microphone, the receiving party will hear the voice slowly drown out in "steps" - this suspected it had something to do /w voice encoding.

Once I disabled LTE - Voice + Data to LTE- Data Only (in Carrier Data settings on your IOS 11 - 11.1.2) it's louder for the receiving end... just don't sing - if you keep the sentences short and bursty you can avoid the mic drowning your voice out - there is something wrong with the voice encoding normalization that goes on in the software