Broken earpiece or speaker

[rza49311]

I'm not sure how it may have happened but it appears my earpiece is broken. When people are talking, the earpiece speaker sounds so garbled/rattled its almost impossible to hear what they are saying. I have tried a reboot and a battery pull obviously. I doubt there's any fix here other than a replacement. I just wanted to let people know that mine has gone south. The speakerphone speaker is still works fine though.

 

[colorfulbliss]

I'm in the same boat. This has now happened to my OG Droid and my Bionic. In my case I'm pretty sure it's due to metallic dust getting into the earpiece(I am a car mechanic). Here's my theory: metallic dust enters the speaker, and when enough of it collects on the membrane, the magnet and the dust pull together and prevent the voice coil from moving freely. In the early stages you get a scratchy sound and it progresses to decreased volume to the point you can no longer hear the other caller. The interesting thing is that I had numerous cell phones in the past that lived through the same environment. Occasionally the sound would get scratchy, but I would just blow out the speaker and all was fine. This doesn't seem to work on moto's Droids. In fact it seems to make it worse.

I'm using a bluetooth earpiece until I decide whether to return phone or to fix it myself. I'm one of the lucky ones that has had nothing more than very minor issues with my Bionic and I'm very uneasy about swapping it for a refurb. Here's a look at what the part looks like if you are interested: Verizon Droid Bionic Speaker Flex Cable with Front Camera Module and Earpiece Speaker, Android Motorola XT875 Earpiece Speaker and Front Camera Imager Assembly with Flexible Ribbon CellularDR.com'd be interested to know if you came into contact with a dusty environment to see if I'm on the right track with my theory!

 

[marinegundoctor]

My Bionic has just started to do the same thing. It's not so bad that I can't understand the call, but it does sound rattled now.

 

[rza49311]

Called tech support and my replacement will be here tomorrow.

This is the first time I've had a Motorola hardware failure. Maybe I've just been lucky but I've gone through e815>Razr Maxx>MotoQ>OG Droid>Bionic and never had a problem until now.

 

[Christobal]

WOW. I logged on to this forum to search for similar problems and found this thread on the top page! Why is this happening so suddenly to several people? I bought mine on launch week and this just started happening for me last week. It's not as bad when I turn the volume way down. I do not work in dusty areas at all. If it were a normal sized speaker with large parts, I would assume something is loose in the hole. The vibration sounds a bit too loud (big) to be a loose part in such a small speaker, if that makes sense.

 

[rza49311]

Yeah, I don't work in a bad environment either. The speaker has gotten much worse since Saturday. Its pretty much unusable now. Im glad I have the replacement coming tomorrow.

Sent from my DROID BIONIC using DroidForums

 

[rza49311]

Got the replacement yesterday and have everything up and running again. The only thing is, I'm wondering if the phone I received had a bad screen or something because I can see two specks of dust below the screen. I remember trying to replace the screen on my wife's Droid pro and it was near impossible to stop every speck of dust from getting on the screen when replacing it. Hoping it doesn't continue to collect dust or this one might have to go back too. My original phone never had any dust problems.