PPP caller hears themselves

[nibblefaster]

Hi forum,

I have been trying to use my PPP explorer edition with latest beta Manjaro Phosh. I am finding that whoever calls me just gets bombed with the sound of their own voice.

I have tried playing with the volume levels of mic and speaker, both with gnome settings, and pulse control. I even tried setting the volume all the way down for everything and it still happens.

Is this maybe a hardware thing?

[wibble]

I can't think how it would be a hardware thing. An audio routing problem in software seems much more likely as in the best tradition of linux it offers you a variety of ways to shoot yourself in the foot. I'd suggest returning to defaults, but I don't know where the changes are stored.

[Chief]

Whether PPP or PP I have found using a good headset works best at all times. I use a Blackberry ear bud set and the voice quality is excellent.

[grinzie]

I recently switched from Arch-Phosh to Mobian-Phosh, and setting the input volume to almost nothing solves this problem, which has existed since the beginning, for me. Also, I set Input/Output Configuration to Phone Call. Also, I turn the Output volume down as low as I can stand during a call and am learning to put my ear directly on the speaker.

I'm not sure if I ever thought to lower the input volume previously, but I am pretty sure that Mobian does a better job of saving Sound Settings across reboots.

At any rate, I had my first clean phone call in three months with one individual yesterday.

[wibble]

You could try investigating the modem's echo cancellation settings. The AT command manual includes AT+QEEC
Set Echo Cancellation Parameters, but provides no detail about what any of the parameters do. It may be purely a passthrough to some native Qualcomm settings. The call audio routing on the pinephone bypasses the alsa and pulseaudio mixers so we don't get to use software echo cancellation. I haven't checked the routing for the PPP but I suspect it's a similar situation.

[EwigeBlumenkraft]

You should edit /usr/share/alsa/ucm2/PinePhonePro/VoiceCall.conf and set the following mic boost options:

IN1 Boost 0

IN2 Boost 1

IN 3 Boost 0

[nibblefaster]

Yup, that sorted it, it does work after all. Made a phone call on the PPP today, with these settings on Manjaro, it works. Thanks for those who posted help!
I also updated the firmware using gnome firmware tool for the modem in case that helped.

[nibblefaster]

Saying that, the caller is very quiet to me, and also not sure if the device wakes from suspend for a call properly.

[baptx]

I was able to fix the echo issue with the PinePhone on Mobian by using alsamixer and pressing the F6 key to select the hardware (or use the command "alsamixer -D hw:0"). Then I changed "Mic1 Boost" from 64 to 0 like mentioned on https://forum.manjaro.org/t/original-pin...ing/153873. Decreasing "Line Out" from 100 to around 50 also helped (this setting decreased the loudspeaker volume which was not working with the volume keys during a call).
I noticed the "Line Out" setting is reset to 100 every time we enable the loudspeaker so a quicker way to reset the setting is to use this command (note that in order to display "50%" in alsamixer, I had to use "60%" in the amixer command):
amixer -D hw:0 set "Line Out" 60%
To permanently set "Line Out" to 50% on the original PinePhone, we can edit /usr/share/alsa/ucm2/PinePhone/VoiceCall.conf and change the appropriate setting (in a similar way to what was explained on https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?...#pid111246).
I also had a black screen during the first call after boot, even after disabling the options "Dim Screen" and "Screen Blank" in Phosh power settings. A workaround is to call the voicemail and the screen will not always be black after a few seconds so we can end the call. However the issue comes from the proximity sensor, which can be disabled by adding "blacklist stk3310" to a file like /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf (https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?...#pid111765).
In my case, calls were only working when pipewire was not installed and only in 3G, not 4G (https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=16943).