Poor car kit voice sound quality

[John Nooij]

In the 1.5 years that I've been driving my IS300h, I've hardly used my Bluetooth car kit, but last week I had to call some people.
What I heard from all callers was that they could hardly hear me, my voice was very soft and they heard a noise that almost drowned out my voice.
I could hear the called person perfectly through the Lexus speakers, the volume was also adjustable. I wonder if the volume of my microphone can also be adjusted?  Where is this microphone located by the way?

I don't have a problem with the Bluetooth pairing of the phone and car.  All functions work, it's just the poor quality of my calls that's bothering me.  The people I made a phone call to know I drive a Lexus, so must have frowned... 😕

Is something wrong with my car kit, or is this another "normal" shortcoming of the Lexus multimedia, compared to other brands?

[Mikey B]

Not sure if there is any adjustment, but I can confirm in my 2014 with the standard stereo the quality of the calls is very good to the point that I have had people not realise I was hands free in the car so hopefully there is something you can sort to improve yours

[John Nooij]

Any idea where the microphone is located in the IS ?

[200h]

i'm sure its in the overhead console for the lights in the front,

i havent had an IS for a while now , i think when your making a call

a menu becomes available to adjust the microphone volume.

[Las Palmas]

Like Michael, sound quality in CT when speaking on phone is OK.

Logically microphone would be near driver's head.

Maybe remove Bluetooth connection and pair again.

[John Nooij]

I found the location of the microphone, it is simply indicated in the manual (I should have looked into it first). And I also found the volume control during the conversation, but it is already set to maximum.

I did some more tests and it turns out that when the car is stationary, people can hear my voice perfectly; so that's not the problem. It is during a conversation while driving that my voice is completely drowned out by a loud noise. So it seems to be a problem with the noise canceling perhaps?

My car is (as we know from Lexus) very quiet while driving, but the car kit microphone apparently amplifies the noise unusually loud.

[route66]

8 hours ago, John Nooij said:

...

. And I also found the volume control during the conversation, but it is already set to maximum.

...

I think that's your problem.

When I got my IS300H first, I set the microphone to maximum and people complained - just like your experience. The trick is to set it to more normal or even lower values and then all be be well. Or, was in my case anyway!

[John Nooij]

Thanks, I will try this. Current transmit volume level is +5, so I will decrease this during a call while driving.

Do you know if this changed volume level is saved for future calls, or should you reduce this with every call you make since there's no setting for this transmit volume to set a default.

[Las Palmas]

Lexus software problems:

The really great ML audio in our cars is unable to read the file systems that can deliver the audio quality that Mark Levinson offer.

Why? Lexus use the FAT32 instead of NTFS formatting. That was understandable in 1990 but since Windows XT (2001) the far better NTFS has been available and all with a bit computer knowledge will know that is far better, does not easily corrupt and lose part of files and can easily be used on far bigger memory discs plus support larger files.

FAT32 isn’t a journaling file system, which means that file system corruption can happen much more easily. With NTFS, changes are logged to a “journal” on the drive before they’re actually made. If the computer loses power in the middle of a file being written, the system won’t need a long scandisk operation to recover.

FAT32 doesn’t support file permissions. With NTFS, file permissions allow for increased security.

As we can see, there are very good reasons why Windows uses NTFS for system partitions. NTFS is more secure, robust, and supports larger file sizes and drives.

[John Nooij]

FAT32... NTFS... wrong topic perhaps? 😉