Brefar, on Jun 26 2009, 16:18, said:
Thanks for the information. Before I do too much though, can you help me understand what each of those settings represents, and how they affect the different speakers on my phone? I want to be able to hear the visual voice mail better, and hear people talking when I'm on a call. But I have no clue as to what several of those settings are for.
Thanks again.
I've experimented with most of them. Some don't seem to have any effect. The one's I know about are these:
Profiles
There are two classes of profiles: Normal, and Talking. Normal profiles are active when not in a phone call. Talking profiles are active when in a call.
The only two Normal profiles you need to adjust are the Handset and Headset profiles. Adjust these to taste for speaker sound and wired headphone sound. Then, just copy your settings for the Headset profile to the Camcoder [sic] profile.
Unless you want something different in terms of loudness and mic sensitivity between Normal and Talking modes, you can simply copy some values across these two classes as well. Samsung makes all of this confusing by having different names for the same parameters in different profiles, and to confuse further, even uses different names for the "same" profile in the respective classes, and then if that hasn't thrown you off they implement the coup de gras: Using the same profile name for different actual profiles!
So, here's it is, untangled. Below are equivalent profiles between classes:
Normal/Handset, Talking/Speakerphone -- Internal speaker, internal mic
Normal/Headset, Talking/Headset -- Wired headphones, wired mic
Normal/Camcoder, Talking/(none) -- Internal speaker, internal mic; custom settings for video record/playback in camera.exe
Normal/(none), Talking/Handset -- Internal earpiece speaker (above display), internal mic
Normal/(none), Talking/BTMono -- Bluetooth device
So, unless you want different sound and mic levels between normal usage and phone calls, you can just copy whatever settings you arrive during your tuning process. Make sure that you follow the HEX IDs for parameters in copying values over -- the names of these identical parameters varies from profile to profile (thanks Samsung).
Output stage (analog?) amplification.
Adjusting these will change the overall volume of the target output device. Adjust these as "max volume" characteristic with the Windows Mobile volume turned all the way up.
ID 02: SPeaKer (SPK), ReCieVe (RCV): This is the relative volume of the external speaker.
ID 04: HeadPhones (HP): Relative volume of wired headphones
Digital to Analog conversion scaling.
This adjusts the the equivalent of amplification in the digital domain, before the analog amplifier.
ID 0C: Digital to Analog Converter (DAC)
Adjusting this will also make sounds louder. Getting optimal setup for this setting and the above output stage settings is a bit tricky. The key is setting this value to maximize volume for a loud source without clipping. Pick a media source that is about the loudest thing you've got on your Omnia (usually a loud piece of music) for making adjustments. Note that this is not "loud" in the sense that it's simply a conceptually loud source; it needs to be a source that was
mastered with high sound levels. This is that issue where some mp3's overall sound too quiet, even though they're rockin' big time, while other similar music sounds much louder simply because the overall sound levels when recording/mastering were set higher. You need to pick the latter sort of music for testing.
To set DAC, play a max-loud source. Adjust the setting to the loudest level you can without audible distortion (clipping). Then, set it one setting level quieter to give a little bit of headroom in case something louder comes along. Note that you don't have to have the system/WM volume turned up all the way, blasting your ears. You can turn it way down, and oversetting DAC will still result in obvious audible distortion in a source with high average sound energy. So, set the system volume to a comfortable level loud enough to still hear even slight distortion (in the audio world known as THD, in this case caused by peak clipping), but not so loud you can't handle it.
Next, choose a source that was mastered on the quiet side, but still has relatively "loud" segments (another piece of rock and roll will do), turn the WM volume up all the way, and adjust SPK and HP in the various profiles to the level that is the max volume you'd like.
After this, you will be able to get satisfactory volume with everything. Most of the time, you won't even be turning the system volume all the way up to be listening quite loud.
Microphone sensitivity
ID 22: MicroPhoneBooST (MPBST)
This sets the level of boost for the microphone in various profiles.
How to adjust: Run \Windows\VoiceRecorder.exe (this is a hidden file -- you will need to unhide it with your File Explorer of choice) a long with SoundTester.exe.
Switch to VoiceRecorder. Record a segment of yourself talking, then play it back and check. Switch to SoundTester, adjust the MPBST value for the profile you are testing, go back to VoiceRecorder and repeat. Continue until you have the settings that produce the sensitivity you want.
Other Settings
Don't bother with the other settings. I experimented extensively with most of them, and couldn't detect any significant impact on volume or mic sensitivity. Some other parameters do interact with the above parms and effect volume and mic sensitivity, but not in any way that I found to be useful beyond adjusting the parameters above.
They all do something, of course. Just not necessarily directly related to loudness or sensitivity. Any changes observed with these other parameters to those characteristics is tangential, not direct.
In particular, RVOL and RBST seem to affect the tonal character of the sound, not the volume. If you want, play with these in VoiceRecorder, set to the extremes, and test the effect. You'll see what I mean.
General Notes
As noted in my posting above regarding revised SoundTester operation, no settings you put in place can be read from the registry and recovered. Also, every time you enter a profile in SoundTester, the values displayed are extremes.
It is critical that you record your settings values for every profile you change, and make sure you've set them all in that profile before hitting Apply. Since I'm usually only changing 2 or 3 of the settings, my method is to always select Cancel first, to set the values to defaults, then set any modified values to what I had them set to, then change the one value I'm interested in and Apply.
This is less of a pain than it might seem, because you can stay on a profile's menu while making adjustments and switching back and forth to another application to play sound and test it without losing your custom changes.
Finally, be aware that any chages you make only take effect when the audio driver is initialized. This happens every time the device port is opened, which is somewhat up to the playback app you're using. In most cases this is pretty much guaranteed to occur when you start playing a song, and gets closed when you stop. Some players will close and re-open the port on pause/play. In any case, the best thing to do is experiment a little first with the player you're using and test making extreme changes to SPK/HP while going back to your player and testing which process (pause/play, stop/play, app quite/restart) is necessary for you to hear the changes.
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