You want an audiophile experience in a speakerphone???? Just what kind of control would you want, "Lots of feedback," "Less feedback," and "No feedback?" As the folks at Starkist might have said, "Sorry Charlie, do you want a speakerphone with good taste, or a speakerphone that sounds good?"
This is one of those things where 99.99999999995% of the population would want it to "Just work," but you'd rather add another obscure setting to an already bewildering lineup of settings. 99% of those who would find and mess with that setting would have no understanding of what "compression" or "limiting" does, and they'd be left wondering why their FaceTime calls now sound like crap. For what? Greater dynamic range and transparency? It's a bleedin' speakerphone conversation, not the New York Philharmonic.
I worked in broadcast and recording studios for over 25 years. For a good portion of those years I engineered at least one live concert broadcast weekly, and at times, daily. I also did live concert sound (PA) in dive bars, bandshells, and auditoriums. There's a reason why, when a radio station DJ turns on his mic the control room speakers shut off and he/she can only hear himself on headphones. It's called feedback (and if he/she's near-deaf and has to crank the headphones to '11' the sound leaking out of the earcups can still cause feedback when he/she cozies up to the mic). The sound goes into the microphone, out the speaker, and back into the microphone, getting louder and louder with each "loop" and in short order it's an eardrum-breaking shriek. Another version of a coder's One Infinite Loop.
There's a reason radio stations often use very aggressive comp/limiting/automatic gain control on the sound pumped out of their transmitters. It's called "intelligibility in difficult listening environments and poor reception areas." What good is an "audiophile" listening experience for those precious few with great listening environments if a large portion of the listening audience with imperfect listening conditions can barely make out a note (or word) for all the noise?
It comes down to "tune-out factors." Poor inteligibility is a major tune-out factor, which equals no listening audience. And just like a radio audience, if people couldn't hear every word of a FaceTime or speakerphone call, they wouldn't use the feature at all. If you asked them to adjust the sound until it was perfect... they wouldn't adjust the sound. They wouldn't have the first idea of how. The first time they got a bit of feedback ("howl-around" in some circles) they'd say, "This sucks" and walk away.
Yeah, it better "just work."
OK, well sorry for the rant. I'll stop before I write six paragraphs about why the beloved sound of black vinyl has a whole lot to do with the comp/limiting applied by disk mastering engineers in order to keep the cutter head from breaking into the adjacent groove. CDs sound "thin" compared to black vinyl because of the wider dynamic range enabled by CDs. That, plus the fatter bottom end on vinyl due to low-frequency garbage - rumble, intermod distortion, 50/60 Hz powerline hum picked up by the magnetic cartridge; the equivalent of a constant organ pedal note that was never part of the score. Bless the audiophiles who fell in love with the dirt that audio engineers spent their careers trying to eliminate.
