How to lower minimum iPhone / iOS volume listening to streaming app on bluetooth headset

Question

I've looked here Reduce minimum

and here Minimum volume too loud

And did not find a solution to this issue - minimum volume on my bluetooth headset paired with my iPhone is too loud when listening to streaming app like Pandora.

One limited solution that should work with wired or wireless headsets - if you listen with just one earpiece:

In settings select: 1. General/Accessibility 2. Scroll down to Audio Volume Balance slider. 3. Move it towards the ear piece that is NOT in your ear. I.e. if you have only the right ear piece in your ear, move the slider towards the left. This will reduce volume in the right ear BELOW the minimum that you can achieve with the regular volume control. Which proves it's possible and why on earth Apple doesn't allow you to lower both channels this way I don't know. 4. May want to enable Mono Audio as well.

Not a solution for hi-fi listening but works well enough for having some casual background music without sacrificing your ear drums.

Has anyone come up with a solution for lowering volume in both ears for streaming audio apps over bluetooth headsets since the other threads were closed?

Answer 1

the " Audio Volume Balance slider " is only a setting to either reconfigure the ear piece so that if one ear piece is more louder than the other. You can change it through that setting or to check if you think one piece is not working this will allow you to verify this, but it is NOT to lower the volume on ear pieces for that you need to press the volume buttons on your iphone or the bluetooth headsets themselves or find the " Audio slider " in the " Audio streaming apps " themselves. To " lower the minimum volume " is based on personal preference. If changing the volume this way does not work then you may be facing a product quality issue in bluetooth headset because not all bluetooth headsets are created equally

Answer 2

Here are some workarounds that can help lower the minimum volume on iOS.

1. If your Bluetooth headset has an accompanying configuration app, use the Equalizer function of this app to reduce the volume. For example, the Bose Music app has an equalizer with three bands. Setting all three bands to -10 will lower the minimum volume of the Bose headset. This technique works well with my Bose QuietComfort Earbuds II.
2. Use loudness normalization. For Apple Music, this is called “Sound Check”, and it will reduce the loudness of louder music tracks. For our case, this has the unfortunate side effect of also increasing the volume of quieter tracks, but generally speaking, I find this is beneficial overall to reducing loudness. This type of function is also called “Replay Gain” in other contexts.
3. Use your media player’s volume level setting if there is one available. For example, Spotify has a setting that can be set to “quiet” to reduce the volume of music playback. Additionally, your music player may have an equalizer setting that could be adjusted to lower the volume of all bands.
4. Tap and hold the volume slider in the Control Center to fine-tune the volume control. This may allow you to reach a lower minimum volume than the physical buttons… but in my experience this depends on the Bluetooth headset. With some headsets, this only changes the visual of the volume level and does not affect the actual volume output to the Bluetooth headset.