Bent Droid razor and speaker problems.

[kradrina]

Hi new to the forums here with a couple of questions. My razr has since day one been having problems with the external speaker, where if i turn it up to full it sounds tinny and nowhere near loud.
Now is this a manufacturer defect since I can't remember ever being in a situation where I would have blown the speaker?
Then last night I put my phone on the counter top and noticed it didn't sit flat with my otter box commuter on. "Weird" I thought maybe it was the case in question? So i took off the case and laid the phone down flat on the counter top and it still doesn't sit flat?! Now Iam wondering if all razor's are like this or if mine has a bend in it somewhere. The screen and digitizer are both fully functioning and there are no cracks anywhere in neither. Anyways sorry for the long post, just had some questions. Thanks!

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[DocsDad]

Is there any sign of the battery swelling?

 

[kradrina]

Nope nothing at all. Battery temps are fine and phone holds a charge perfectly as well.

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[SallyC]

Mine lays flat and the speaker sounds fine. It would be interesting to see what a Verizon dealer thought of it.

 

[FoxKat]

If you're sure the surface you are laying it on is flat, then there's a problem with the phone. There is a possibility that it may just need to be pressed together along all the edges to re-seat the case clips and snap the case shut properly. If there is a twist to the phone, this will leave a gap in the foam seal surround (see black outline below circled in red) that encompasses the speaker between the center frame and back cover and creates an acoustic containment to enhance middle and lower frequencies. This would explain the "tinny" sound as well as the reduced volume.


View attachment 48666


If you took a speaker out of one of your home stereo speaker cabinets and played it at normal volume, it too would sound tinny and lacking in any reasonable midrange or bass response as well as being reduced in apparent volume. The speaker alone doesn't produce the sound so much as it excites the air around it. It's the cabinet that concentrates that excited air and projects it forward. It's the acoustics that make it sound fuller. Just like a violin. Without the acoustics of the cabinet (body of the violin), it would be barely audible.

As Sally said, I suggest you take it to a Verizon dealer's store and compare it with a demo phone, and let a representative hear it.

Good luck!

 

[kradrina]

Wow you guys are absolutely phenomenal. I think the twist is in the bottom right corner so i don't know if it would affect the speaker being in that area. I live in Canada and rogers warranty claim process sucks so i just wanted to double check and see if it was a manufacturing defect before they say otherwise. Thanks again you guys rock!

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[FoxKat]

Wow you guys are absolutely phenomenal. I think the twist is in the bottom right corner so i don't know if it would affect the speaker being in that area. I live in Canada and rogers warranty claim process sucks so i just wanted to double check and see if it was a manufacturing defect before they say otherwise. Thanks again you guys rock!

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We're just here to help! If the twist is in the bottom right corner when looking at the face of the phone, then there would likely be an equal and opposite twist in the top left corner. That is the corner where the rear speaker is mounted, so I believe you may be on to something. Do you have a camera and could you snap a pic of the phone when looking at the left side edge while laying on a table (the side without buttons) for us to see?

 

[kradrina]

The bend is very subtle so it would be hard to photograph properly without a macro lens haha. You can only feel it when you lay it flat and gently rock it. It rocks about a mm or so. I took my otter box off and looked at the seems and pushed around it, but no give or snaps telling me that it seated into place.

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[FoxKat]

The bend is very subtle so it would be hard to photograph properly without a macro lens haha. You can only feel it when you lay it flat and gently rock it. It rocks about a mm or so. I took my otter box off and looked at the seems and pushed around it, but no give or snaps telling me that it seated into place.

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Well, I might want you to compare how it sounds versus another Droid RAZR. I am wondering if it simply sounds "tinny" to you simply because you are used to the sound from older style phones with speakerphone capability. In other words, I am wondering if there really isn't anything wrong with the phone at all, other than that it is a tiny speaker that is used to produce the sound.

Earlier phones had more room to have larger transducers which move more air, so they sound better at farther distances from the phone. As these phones get thinner and thinner, the transducer (speaker) inside gets smaller and smaller as well. The area it has to vibrate within (vibration creates the sound) also gets smaller and smaller as well. By utilizing some very high tech waveform manipulation, creating spaces for sound to essentially multiply and amplify, they are able to take a very small transducer with very little vibration and through these techniques generate much louder sound than would be expected, and reproduce much lower frequencies (midrange and bass) than what would be expected as well.

Bose is perhaps the most widely known company who used this technique to turn the sound from a speaker no bigger than your fist into a thumping bass subwoofer and then using that technique shoved it into a table radio. The "Waveguide" uses some very powerful mathmatics and precise measurements of distance, diameter, frequency and pitch to produce the impression that the sound is coming from a large speaker cabinet with a large woofer driver. This technique has been utilized and then dissected and reinvented to obtain similar properties with these micro-transducers in our phones of today.

The problem is that there is a limit to how far those sounds travel once out in open air. For sound to travel, the waves of audio have to be strong enough to continue pushing the air in front of it at the same frequency for great distances and in increasing area. The problem with these microtransducers is that they can produce very well balanced sound but only in a very short proximity to the speaker simply because of their sheer size and the minute amounts of air they actually move. Bass frequencies are unfortunately the hardest to make travel great distances unless large volumes of air are being moved, where in contrast high frequencies can travel very great distances with only a tiny amount of actual air movement (like the tweeters in home speaker systems). So the farther away you get from those tiny transducers in these phones, the more and more "tinny" the sound becomes as the volumes of air movement diminish in the bass frequencies but still continue to travel in the higher "tinny" frequencies.

Put that same speakerphone up to your ear and turn the volume way down, and you'll be impressed at how good it actually sounds. This is how headphones can make such incredible sound and yet just a few feet away someone else can barely hear them. Now they have in-ear headphones that can reproduce sounds with response that rivals high fidelity sound systems for homes or commercial applications costing tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. It all has to do with distance from the ear drum. The closer it can get, the less movement of the transducer is required, and the smaller the transducer can be.

 

[kradrina]

Sadly my uncle has the exact same phone as me. Side by side his has no wobble and the volume is louder. When impress the speaker up to my ear it is very shrill with the high notes way up there and not much else. And another problem to this list. Whenever I add media to my external SD card and then proceed to take it off after watching it (movies) the card still registers the same space amount as to when i put the content on, not removed it. Is there any way to refresh my SD card so it always shows the correct storage amount?

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[FoxKat]

Sadly my uncle has the exact same phone as me. Side by side his has no wobble and the volume is louder. When impress the speaker up to my ear it is very shrill with the high notes way up there and not much else. And another problem to this list. Whenever I add media to my external SD card and then proceed to take it off after watching it (movies) the card still registers the same space amount as to when i put the content on, not removed it. Is there any way to refresh my SD card so it always shows the correct storage amount?

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Well have you tried to boot in Safe mode to see if the sound problem remains?

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[kradrina]

No I have not. How do you do that? I have it rooted if that makes it easier....

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[FoxKat]

No I have not. How do you do that? I have it rooted if that makes it easier....

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http://www.droidforums.net/forum/droid-razr-support/200128-accessing-safe-mode-your-razr.html

Also, if you are rooted, what other root based apps are you running?

 

[kradrina]

Iam running ad free, busybox, rom toolbox, and ultimate toolbox. you think any of those would be the "root" of my problem?

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[FoxKat]

Iam running ad free, busybox, rom toolbox, and ultimate toolbox. you think any of those would be the "root" of my problem?

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Not likely.

Try running in Safe mode and let's see if the speaker sounds the same. If it does, there's only one thing left to do to troubleshoot and that's a Factory restore, but that will remove all your existing apps other than the stock ones. You can re-root afterwards, or you can download and install Voodoo OTA Rootkeeper, install and run, then click "Protect Root". Then after Factory restore, re-download the Rootkeeper and run, this time selecting "Restore Root".

Let's see how the Safe mode works first.