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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

I miss exactly two things from android on iOS. Both involve Bluetooth not sucking.

The first one is that the minimum volume on my Bluetooth earbuds is too damn loud on iOS. This is true for every third party set of headphones I have tried. People have been complaining about this online for a decade. The EU even passed a law to make them fix it (spoiler alert: it did not work).

FFS, min volume in the UI should map to hardware volume level integer one!

The second issue is that third party apps can’t expose music or podcasts via the car bluetooth media browsing menu. They can on android.

That means I can listen to podcasts and stream tidal using the jogwheel on my car with android, but not ios.

Other Bluetooth complaints:

Why does my Apple Watch blacklist car stereos?

Bluetooth is really buggy in iOS version N and N-1.

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> The first one is that the minimum volume on my Bluetooth earbuds is too damn loud on iOS. This is true for every third party set of headphones I have tried.

That's wild. I've never experienced anything like that -- not with AirPods or Bose or a cheap brand TOZO.

Are you sure it's not a problem with the earbuds themselves, that their minimum level is higher than it should be?

If you've dug into it, what is the range/steps of Bluetooth volume levels, and which are the range/steps that iOS supports?

Also, have you ever tried dragging the volume slider in iOS? That lets you set volume smoothly, not restricted to increments. Does that not let you set the smallest volume?

I've had the same issue with some wired IEMs on iOS, using Apple's official USB-C to 3.5mm adaptor. I even have the EU model A2155 of the USB-C to 3.5mm adaptor that's supposed to have half the power of the US model.

What I found that helped was to create a custom Shortcut that "Set Media volume to 1%". iOS reports that this is 48 dB when playing pink noise. I managed to hit 47 dB when dragging to volume slider on iOS below 1%, but the Shortcuts app only seems to support integer percentages.

In my case, even the 1% volume level was too high in a quiet room, but some apps have a custom EQ setting that you can use to lower the volume further. E.g. if you're using Apple Music, you can go to Settings -> Music -> EQ and pick "Loudness" to lower the volume further.

You can buy passive inline volume knobs for 3.5mm headphones. They’re just a pair of variable resistors attached to a knob and cost about $10.

Unfortunately, they're not great to use with a phone in your pocket, since then the motion of walking around will adjust the knob and change the volume.

Although, come to think of it, I could probably just glue the knob into a fixed −10 dB of attenuation and then use software volume control to change the volume.

I have also noticed that those passive inline volume knobs tend to adjust the right and left channels by different levels, especially with low-impedance outputs like IEMs, but that might because the ones I've bought cost ~US$2 from AliExpress.

I could probably also fix the issue by buying a worse/less-powerful USB-C to 3.5mm DAC. The official Apple one is pretty well liked by the audiophile community, since it's powerful for the price, which is great if you have high-end headphones, but horrible if you have earbuds/IEMs.

Weirdly enough, the same Apple USB-C to 3.5mm DAC is much quieter on Android, since it defaults to a low hardware volume on the DAC, and Android then only uses software volume control to lower the volume, see https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/242221770.

> That's wild. I've never experienced anything like that -- not with AirPods or Bose or a cheap brand TOZO.

I had something similar with a usb 'sound card' I was using with a mac. I had to use some DSP software to artificially reduce the sound level to about 1%, and then it was usable. Worked fine on windows as I recall. I had a similar issue with a set of logitech usb speakers; one pair worked great, so I ordered a second pair, where (on windows) the lowest output volume is tremendously loud, I couldn't get the DSP software to stick though, and ended up replacing them.

In conclusion, computers are awful.

AirPods Pros and iPhone, same issue with the minimum volume not allowing a low enough volume. I want it to be quieter on the low end. I have a lot of issues with my AirPods and they are some of the best I’ve used, unfortunately.

I’ve also experienced the other issues in this thread about headsets switching modes when the microphone is activated. I had a pair of Bose noise cancelling headphones and original they worked nearly perfectly but after a firmware update the bug I updated for was fixed but it made the loopback from microphone to headphones always on. Why can’t they make any “perfect” headphones and why is this stuff seemingly so hard?

You can press and hold on the volume in the control panel on the iOS menu screen to get a fine-grained volume control and go lower than "minimum". Is even that too loud?

I’ve tried dragging the slider. One pixel is louder than the bottom stop from the volume buttons on android. Haven’t tested with bose or no-name stuff. Mostly just midrange audiophile stuff.

+1 here

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