When I change the sound, there is a threshold of 13% where I cannot lower the volume any further without losing it. I tested this with the Shortcuts app: when I put it down to 12%, you hear nothing.
The 7%, 5% and 3% would be the ones that I would like to use also for my headset, but they work only with the loudspeakers.
Thus, there is still some space left that I can shift the volume button down. Here you see the 13%.
You will hit 13% also without the app, just the first sound you hear when you use the buttons of your headset, checked. The app is not needed to reach these 13% well enough, neither is the volume bar needed to fine-tune this to 13%.
And in big screen after holding the press on the volume here, you get a better fine-tuning, 13% in the screeshot:
That small space that is left at the 13% bottom puts all volume to 0 volume. In a quiet room or when you have noise cancelling ear muffs on top of (in-)ear headphones, the minimum volume is still too loud.
I have
- an iPhone 7, and I read from a comment that on an iPhone 8, you might not have this issue anymore. It is unclear, though, whether that comment was about headphones.
- iOS 15.7, but this should be needless to say since this problem has always been there.
Workarounds so far:
- One workaround is to put in some ear-plugs, use headphones on top of them, and then just put the sound-volume slightly louder than the minimum just to hear enough, but that does not work for (in-)ear headphones.
- Another "calm morning" trick against the loudness is to put headphones not on your ears, but on your temples next to them, and make it louder so that you hear it like it came from a radio out there.
These workarounds work, but it should be easier than that. What I am searching for is an App or setting that allows changing the the system volume finer than the OS menu (= the buttons of the headphones) allows it, and below the threshold of 13 %.
When I do not use headphones, but the normal loudspeaker, I can go down to whatever percentage and it will always change with it. Therefore, it is just a problem of the headset. The threshold is 13% both for a Bluetooth headset and a cable headset.
In some way, this not a duplicate of Can I set the volume on my iPhone lower than the slider goes?, since that is about a missing fine-tuning lower than the slider goes, while I cannot even tune anything in rough 1% steps at the bottom 12 %. The other question might help others, and thanks to the answers there, I knew about the Shortcuts app trick and the full screen volume handler trick.
How to get a lower sound volume than the system minimum of 13% volume for headsets on an iPhone?
PS: for brightness, it works
There is the same problem with the default screen brightness that is too light in the full darkness, but that can be put lower than the lowest default brightness by going to: --> Settings --> Accessibility. Then:
- either you go to: --> Display & Text Size --> Reduce White Point (I have it at 90%)
- or you go to --> Zoom --> Zoom Filter
But in the Accessibility settings, I could not find out where to tweak the sound to a lower level.
