Xperia 10 II echo during calls

Bug Reports
21

Open a terminal and enter the following command:

devel-su journalctl -f >mjun.log

Then immediately (otherwise the file will get too large) reproduce the problem, then immediately break the command with Ctrl-c.

Then have a good look at the log and identify the relevant timespan. Post that part to a pastebin and share the link here.

1 Like
22

here is the (whole) log - it’s not that big: https://pastebin.com/raw/RWmA8URy

I don’t see anything special in this log, but I really don’t know what to look at

23

Yeah I don’t see anything obvious either, sorry. Maybe somebody else can. There’s quite a few entries unambiguously related to you making a call.

BTW the phone number is in there in plain text, maybe you’d like to change that.

24

Yeah, It doesn’t look like a “bug” per-se, more like an audio routing issue.

Thanks for pointing at the phone number, I replaced the link with new pastebin.

I’ll start poking around /vendor/etc/mixer_paths.xml - I might have some success by modifying mic sensitivity, or mic assignment (this was actually pretty common with lineageos back in the day).

For starters I’ll try to just disable top mic altogether during calls.

1 Like
25

So there really is a mic at the top, huh? I was wondering what that little hole is for.

Why is there a mic on top at all? I think I’ve seen that on other phones as well.

26

Stereo recording? and twenty chars

27

Modern mobile phones (actually in past 10 years or so) have at least two microphones, sometimes even 4 or more for ANS (active noise suppression), ANC (active noise cancellation) and AEC (active echo cancellation).

In a more typical setup (for example X10 II), both microphones are exposed and the top one is used for ANS and ANC during calls and for (stereo) video recording.

All of these are available even on AOSP but specific vendors have more advanced libraries.

If you look at your /vendor/etc/ directory on SFOS you will notice couple of xml files - these are related to audio subsystem on android (which is exposed to SFOS, and if I’m not mistaken, handled by pulseaudio through various sinks).

Two files are of particual interest: mixer_paths.xml (contains various configurations for inputs and outputs, you can think of this like a static audio mixer) and audio_effects.xml

For example you can clearly see configuration for AEC and NS in audio_effects.xml:

    <effects>
        ...
        <effect name="aec" library="qcom_pre_processing" uuid="0f8d0d2a-59e5-45fe-b6e4-248c8a799109"/>
        <effect name="ns" library="qcom_pre_processing" uuid="1d97bb0b-9e2f-4403-9ae3-58c2554306f8"/>
    </effects>
    <preprocess>
        <stream type="voice_communication">
            <apply effect="aec"/>
            <apply effect="ns"/>
        </stream>
    </preprocess>
4 Likes
28

TIL! Thanks for the detailed explanation.

29

Possible related audio-sources-swapped. Could it be that during a call audio source is routed from microphone above and because earpiece is so close other end gets echo?

30

I had also this on Sony X10ii. First I changed the cover, because without hardcase it works perfect! Then I used follow line pactl set-source-volume 2 5%. The 5% seems to be less but it works. Maybe it helps.

31

can not reproduce echo on my 10II, tested on 2G and VoLTE.

i dont remember what version of android was there originally after unpacking, but with no android updates just directly flashed to some SFOS v3 i think. friend was using this phone for several years and when he gave it to me back i reflashed:

SW_binaries_for_Xperia_Android_10.0.7.1_r1_v12b_seine
Sailfish_OS-Jolla-4.6.0.15-xqau52-1.0.0.16
32

thanks, I’ll try that.

I’ve been playing with mixer_paths.xml and got some positive results. If I set volume of DEC8 to 0 then echo is much much lower.

I have also observed one interesting thing, if you just say one word it will echo back, but if you keep talking echo will stop after a second or two. This looks like AEC is working but is not calibrated properly or mic sensitivity is misconfigured.

Also, as @arle pointed out, and I initially suspeced, there just might be general audio routing issue. I’ll probably try to extract mixer_paths.xml from stock android image to compare settings (currently I’m having no luck unpacking sony .ftf image on my mac…)

1 Like
33

Just wanted to let you know this did not work for me.

2 Likes
34

I wanted to share here that me and a colleague of mine have the same behaviour after upgrading to the latest 5.0.0.67.

We have both the Xperia 10 III.
Before the upgrade we won’t had this echo problem.

35

I have a 10III and the same problem, the other side of the call reports echo, i hear them perfect. Annoying problem.

1 Like
36

Just wanted to note that I have gave up on this, X10II and SFOS altogether now. I have spent so much money on licences and obsolete devices that I just don’t want to experiment anymore.

I’ll return to SFOS when the following two things happen:

  • there is 100% supported device out there with modern capabilites
  • there is clear policy regarding what “stable” means. Currently SFOS is just rolled out, new things added, old things broken, and this repeats after every release

I do wish all the best to jolla team and really hope SFOS thrives in the future, but i think there is years and years of work ahead to get to at least 100% stable state. I believe most of people here are happy to test and experiment, I’m unfortunately not one of those - core stuff (calling, wifi/data, messages, mail, browsing needs to be flawless).

1 Like