from Hacker News

Fixing the volume on my Bluetooth earbuds

by rain1 on 10/28/23, 5:06 PM with 87 comments

• by Vicinity9635 on 10/28/23, 7:13 PM

  Man I wish someone would do this for my bluetooth sleep mask.

  It's pretty great except for one thing: When the battery is low or it's going to power off it announces it to you at full volume.

  On a sleep mask.

• by jjoonathan on 10/28/23, 7:00 PM

  NICE! Way to stick with it OP!

  Speaking of loud earbuds, I might have the opposite problem. I use Bose exercise earbuds on the treadmill at what I believe is a comfortable and conservative volume, but my iPhone gives me a notification that the volume is too high and I am wrecking my hearing.

  Is the phone correct? If so, I'd be willing to sacrifice a bit of enjoyment for a bit of ear health. However, there's a compelling alternative hypothesis: these earbuds have a distinctively lower physical volume at a given volume setting than others I have used, so lazy modeling on Apple's part could be expected to generate a false notification like the one I receive. I want to commend Apple if they did the right thing and built a database mapping (model,volume_setting)->physical_volume. Unfortunately, the complete lack of details in the notification and feature description do not inspire confidence and I do not want to make my workouts shittier just because Apple put a college homework quality model into production.

  Does anyone here know if the data science backing these notifications is competent?

• by solarkraft on 10/28/23, 9:38 PM

  I love this stuff. All of a sudden this model of earphones is quite interesting to me.

  Side note: The system sounds a bluetooth device makes are among the strongest differentiating factors (with some being completely awful; see https://youtu.be/J2wPsH64JEM). Yet I have never seen a review or product page which tells you about what sound (which you will have to hear multiple times per day, with no way to opt out!) the product will make.

  The ability to change them also seems like a pretty easy differentiator.

• by lightedman on 10/28/23, 9:21 PM

  I'd like a way for phones to know if the headset that is connected is a speaker set, IEMs, bone conduction, etc. The "Volume is too loud" notification is annoying when I'm using my regular speaker set and WANT the volume cranked so I can hear it across the house, and doubly-annoying when I'm using bone conduction headphones as they need to be at an appreciable volume for you to hear them well.

• by Namidairo on 10/28/23, 11:27 PM

  Ah, lucky that this is an Airoha target without firmware encryption.

  Also there's an 010 Editor template for the firmware format if you're curious.

  https://github.com/ramikg/airoha-firmware-parser

• by contravariant on 10/29/23, 1:51 AM

  I appreciate the skill, but I can't help but lament the effort needed to do something as basic as just slightly modifying the volume a file plays at. Getting a tool to do what you want probably shouldn't require this much effort.

• by WhereIsTheTruth on 10/29/23, 11:01 AM

  > I asked them via email about this and they responded promptly and said that there was nothing they could do, which is understandable

  No, this is not "understandable", you paid for the product, it's a problem that should be fixed

• by numpad0 on 11/1/23, 6:45 PM

  Quick note: I got a used Tozo T6 after reading this, visually looking to be manufactured rather recently. I was unable to recreate this. In fact, I could not even have headset recognized by the official Tozo app, nor verify that the headset uses Airoha chipset, identified by AAC support. Mine only supports SBC. Either I got a fake, or internal changes were made since author purchased one.

  Some of audio files sound same as what are included in partial Airoha SDKs on the Internet, but it also plays other novel voice files. If anyone is looking to independently verify/play with this result, fake AirPods might be a better path towards it.

• by maxglute on 10/29/23, 6:34 AM

  I wish more people complained about loud / bad system sounds.

• by tux3 on 10/28/23, 7:18 PM

  My Sony headset (wh-1000xm4) has the exact same problem, but they apparently encrypt the firmware payloads and decrypt them on device.

  I've come this close to taking it apart and trying to dump and probe everything, but my shaky hands are too likely to break it.

  I would pay very good money for a hackable noice-cancelling headset.

• by abdullahkhalids on 10/28/23, 10:03 PM

  Why do the earbuds have the sound files in mp3 format rather than some raw uncompressed format? Doesn't this mean that the earbuds must now have a mp3 decoder?

  Is there a resource-usage argument for preferring mp3?

• by sir_brickalot on 10/29/23, 5:08 PM

  I would need the opposite:

  The volume on my Airpod 2 are waaaaay to low on my Samsung phone.

  No problem with the Airpods on an Ipad or with my Bose QC II on my mobile.

  Bluetooth is such a pain.

• by causality0 on 10/28/23, 10:04 PM

  I kept a pair of Tozo T6's in my pocket for several years. Honestly... buy better buds. You don't even have to spend more money. I haven't touched my Tozos since I got a pair of Comfobuds Mini.

• by ravenstine on 10/28/23, 6:55 PM

  This is the one thing I dislike about Apple Airpods. I also don't like the connection sound effect because it adds a needless 2 second delay. Would love to get rid of both sound effects.

• by 3abiton on 10/29/23, 7:54 AM

  That was an amazing read. Learned quite a lot from your journey! I wish such simple things didn't need much user hacking.

• by eviks on 10/29/23, 11:17 AM

  A sad state of affairs in the realm of hardware and firmware design when fixing such trivialities requires so much effort

• by mongol on 10/29/23, 7:44 AM

  This adds yet another argument to my list of why I prefer cheap wired earbuds. But great determination!

• by kls0e on 10/29/23, 2:18 AM

  this was fun to read. enjoyable to follow. thanks