Hello friends, I hope and wish you all are well.
I bought a new iPhone 16 Pro, and I could notice something curious during use: depending on the situation, the sound volume seems to decrease and increase automatically. I'm not talking about the volume percentage, it remains unchanged, but it seems that the sound is reduced by a certain amount of decibels.
I could notice that the sound decreases when the system detects that it may be too loud, but I can't disable this function.
Has anyone noticed this in this or other iPhone models? Does it happen to have to do with iOS 18?
Thank you very much for the comments.
Comments
Noticed this.
Hi Ricardo: I've noticed this especially when I'm reading about a show or movie on Netflix. When I exit the app, volume returns to where I set it.
A Fix That Worked For Me
I can't guarantee that this will work, but it did for me. All I had to do was turn the equalizer off on the voices I'm using, and that fixed it for me. I've offered this solution to other people, and some say it worked for them, and others had no luck. I guess all you can do is try and see what happens.
Good idea
I'll try and give my feedback. Thank you very much, I had really forgotten the equalizer
thanks Earl
Hi Earl and everybody,
I didn't even know about the equaliser, so thanks for that. I've just turned it off for Daniel, my primary voice, so we'll see if that changes anything. Ever since iOS 18, I've been having this issue where I'll be doing any task with VoiceOver, doesn't matter which app it is, and the VoiceOver volume will suddenly decrease, but when I try and turn it up, after a few seconds, the volume goes back to what it originally should have been if VoiceOver hadn't gone quiet, so making VoiceOver really loud. So I have to turn it down again. I'm on an iPhone 12 mini.
@tara are you sure you don't have audio ducking on?
It's simple I know, but sometimes we can turn on settings and not know about it or forget about it.
re Brad
Hi Brad,
I've got audio ducking on to turn down VoiceOver when any media is playing, and that works fine. What happens is different to that. For example, the volume decreases very suddenly, and audio ducking doesn't do that. Audio ducking is more gradual. It kind of fades out slowly. But in this case, I'll be reading something, or doing something, and the volume will decrease quickly, and sometimes almost to the point I can hardly hear my iPhone, or at least, it's quieter than audio ducking, and audio ducking doesn't decrease the volume so much that I can't hear VoiceOver properly sometimes. But I'm wondering with the equaliser turned off, that might help. We'll see.
Funny, curious...
Would you believe Apple's accessibility team asked me the same thing, about having audio ducking turned on?
Sound volume fluctuating all the time!
I believe this is a bug, and unfortunately there is no consistency as to how this happens, which makes it difficult to reproduce this bug for feedback. Sometimes, out of nowhere and randomly, the volume goes high, and then, drops.
Sound Volume
What situations are causing this bug to occur as I haven't noticed any reduction in sound volume with EQ enabled using Daniel on an iPhone 16 Pro.
The equalizer button.
Where is that equalizer button that can be turned off? Thought it was a voiceover setting.
The equalizer button
When you are in VoiceOver settings, it can be found under speech and under each individual voice you have set up. To make it clearer, you need to disable it for each voice individually.
Long Standing Bug
I don't remember when I started experiencing this bug, but it's been quite a while ago. It's definitely unique from the audio ducking feature. I notice this a lot when watching YouTube videos. I find that sometimes repeatedly turning VO off and back on a couple of times tends to help, because usually I find that the audio for my media lowers even when I turn VO off. When I'm scrolling through Twitter or Blue Sky, I notice that my VO volume will randomly raise or lower too. I've just learned to live with it until they hopefully fix it one day. I have reported this a while ago to Apple Accessibility. I'll have to look at that equalizer thing, as I didn't even remember that was a thing.