Hi Ian
I assure you that I do not post baseless posts on forums. The fact that you might sell hundreds of phones and are not aware of a problem has no bearing on reality whatsoever - not in this instance anyway. Just because someone does not phone in or post on a forum that they are having difficulties with people hearing them does not somehow equate to there not being a problem.
Look at it like this ...if you phone someone and they tell you "Ian, I can;t hear yo properly mate ... speak up a bit or move the mic closer to your mouth" and only when you actually raise your voice do they say they can hear you perfectly ..what would you think? Probably what I did ..they have a bad line. Secondly, when you speak to someone on the phone and you battle to hear them, do you think their phone is up the spout or that there is a bad connection/line?
The fact is, 99% of the time, people will NOT equate not being able to hear someone properly to there being anythng wrong with a phone (not just this one, ANY phone.) This is because we ALL have this problem at some point or another, and it is usually not anythng to do with the phone. Therefore, very few people (myself included) will think anything of battling to hear someone and will most certainly not run to the vodafone forums and start posting things about it. Theyu will also not complain about it to anyone. It is when you have multiple people telling you on virtually every occasion you talk to them that they are battling to hear you that alarm bells start ringing. (no pun intended)
I am a sound engineer by trade so I understand the technical side of things behind sound recording/generation.
If you have stuck a microphone inside an air tight compartment there WILL be a loss of sensitivity, regardless of how well the microphone performs and no matter how flexible you make the water-tight membrane. Perhaps they have made the actual diaphragm of the mic the waterproof membrane, but even that has consequences and it all results in the same thing ... loss of sensitivity of the microphone. There is a thing called the "inverse square law" which says if you measure the volume of a sound at a particular point every tme you double that distance you halve the volume. The effect of this is obviously the most prominent the closer you are to the sound/mic. if you measure the sound at 1/200th of an inch away from the source, the sould level will be HALF at 1/100th and half again at 1/50th and so on and so forth This means that the distance from the mic on the phone and your mouth plays a critical part in how well your voice is picked up. Then just as important (because of this inverse sqaure law) even the physical attributes of a persons face and tone of their voice factors in. Think of when you drive past an open air concert (at a distance) ... what do you hear? You only hear the bass and lower mid range notes (depending on distance from actual speakers). There is a reason for that - different sound frequencies have different energy properties. What I am trying to show you is that a persons voice (both timbre and volume) plus how far their mouth is from the mic and the persons facial geometry play a massive part in how well their voice is captured by the mic. It is very possible that for some people, there is NO problem with them being heard at all on the S5. In my case (and the others that have said the same thng I am saying) there is an issue.
So, this is my reasoning behind saying just because you (or Samsung) are not inundated with calls from people complaining about not being able to be heard properly does not mean there is not an issue.
There is an issue AND this is not something you can fix with a repair, because I will absolutely guarantee that if I give you my phone and you examine it and test everything, you will find absolutely nothing wrong with it (apart from the phoney chrome finish on the USB cover which has already rubbed off after 2 months because of having to open that damn flap every time you have to charge your phone.)
Furthermore, if I raise my voice and I position the phone so that I am about to swallow the USB port (ok, exaggerating for the sake of emphasis) then people can hear me perfectly, BUT ... the moment I talk in my usual voice (I have a very deep voice) then people I speak to (including a couple of people from vodafone - who were the first to bring it to my attention that I could not be heard properl;y btw) cannot hear me properly.
I personally think Samsung dropped the ball on this model and that their design was driven by their obsession to compete with the iPhone (which has not helped as it is still outselling the S5) and Sony Z3. I have used my mobile phones since 1997 without dropping them down the loo or into a beer mug/swimming pool/puddle ... a waterproof phone was and is for me, not even on my list of things I need to look at before making a decision about purchasing a phone. I think they added all of the junk (less than useless heart rate monitor, that if it was/is to believed, I would be dead from the 300BPM heartrate)
So to end of my blog - thank you for the offer of reparing my phone, but it is not broken. The problem is more than likely caused by the combination of the design of the mic/housing and my voice/facial features. If you are offering a total face makeover etc ... I might consider that 🙂
All jokes aside though, if Samsung want to do something to address this issue, they should provide a setting to increase the sensitivity on the mic - problem solved instantly. They might even be able to do that with firmware/software within the confines of the present physical setup of the phone.
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