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Sound quality issue between 4 and 4s when listening to music?

J

JATPrototype

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 21, 2010
30
0
Was at work yesterday listening to music on my iPhone 4s using my Bose SoundDock. I was listening to a song and noticed that the baseline was coming through scratchy and muffled. Then it it hit me to try listening to the same song on my 4 which I'm carrying around with me as an iPod. I don't ever remember the sound quality being that bad playing my 4 through the sounddock. So when I played the same song on the sounddock using my 4 the quality was perfect. Both settings were the same on both phones and it was the same song but the quality was completely different between the 4 and 4s. My question is does anyone know what could have caused this? Could it be the new iOS 5 which I don't have running on my 4. Could it be some sort of hardware issue with the 4s and the sounddock?
 
Last edited:
P

Pattycerts

macrumors 6502
Jul 4, 2007
275
0
Is the 4S in a case? Some cases don't allow the dock connector to enter all the way on the SoundDock

Case or not, make sure the phone is in all the way anyway.

My SD (the portable one, doubt it matters though) sounds fine when using my 4S, so I would think its a phone issue. Maybe re-sync your music, sometimes they copy over poorly
 
J

JATPrototype

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 21, 2010
30
0
It isn't the case, have bumpers on both phone. Did some more testing today and realized I have the same problem when listening through my headphones. Have no idea what's going on.
 
FreakinEurekan

FreakinEurekan

macrumors 603
Sep 8, 2011
5,529
2,586
Check your settings in iTunes when you sync the music, do you maybe have the 4S set to downconvert music to 128Kbps? On the Sync Summary page for that device, it's a checkbox "Convert higher bit rate songs to 128 kbps AAC". Makes a big difference in sound quality.
 
J

JATPrototype

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 21, 2010
30
0
not it either, all the settings on both phones are exactly the same, the EQ on both phones are off, looking like im gonna have to make an appt at the genius bar
 
J

JATPrototype

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 21, 2010
30
0
So I ended up going to the genius bar, he did a DFU restore and I dled a song from my itunes on my phone and it seemed that the problem had gone away. Well I had to restore my phone from a back up and then loaded music back on my phone. Listened to some music and guess what the problem came back. So from what I can gather when I download a song from itunes on the phone the quality is fine. I deleted the song from the phone and loaded it back on via usb and the quality got messed up again. Somehow from loading songs to my phone via my macbook the quality gets distorted. Can't figure out how to solve this issue.
 
K

k.i.t.t.o.

macrumors newbie
Mar 21, 2008
24
0
I have the exact same issue, and I find that it varies depending on the genre - the distortion usually won't show up in pop and some rap music, but heavy metal (especially those with heavy bass lines) frequently suffers from it. Playing with the EQ does help somewhat - bass reducer and tremble (or vocal) booster tends to eliminate the weird noise by minimizing the bass in songs.
 
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