Louder than the slider seems to allow
Find the three separate volumes a phone keeps, raise the ceiling that quietly caps them, and make speech clearer without making everything louder.
People turn the volume up, find it still too quiet, and conclude the phone is at its limit. Usually it is not — they have turned up one of several volumes, and there is a ceiling sitting above it that nobody has mentioned.
And there is a fourth thing, which is not volume at all: whether speech stands out from the noise behind it. Turning everything up makes the background louder too. There is a separate control for lifting voices alone, and it is the one people wish they had found first.
Key points
- Set the ring volume in Settings, where the side buttons cannot knock it down
- Find the headphone loudness ceiling and decide for yourself where it sits
- Lift voices without lifting the background noise behind them
- Know which volume the buttons on the side are actually changing
What to remember
- Reduce loud sounds is switched on by default on a great many phones, and it caps everything you hear through headphones.
- The volume buttons always change the sound that is currently playing. Everything else has its own slider.
- Headphone accommodations tunes sound for your ears specifically, rather than making everything louder.
Try this
On your own phone, go to Settings, then Sounds, and turn Change with buttons off after setting the ring where you want it. It is the single change that stops a phone going quiet by itself in a coat pocket.
Practice: Louder than the slider seems to allow. Your first lesson is free, with no account or card; the rest are part of a Lantern plan. Interactive lessons require JavaScript.