Hi, everyone! I'm sharing this in as many relevant threads as I can find because I want to share the love, as this might be the source of a TON of different complaints about audio issues on Pixel phones.
So after a couple of years of apparently annoying all my friends and family with my painfully loud and unfiltered phone calls, I finally figured out why: those tiny holes on the top and bottom of the phone are ambient mics that WORK TOGETHER to cancel out background noise.* My phone case has openings for the mics, but apparently the HOLES IN MY PHONE CASE WERE TOO SMALL for the mics to work properly.
So basically I've been calling people with no noise cancelling functionality, and the tiniest of sounds were apparently getting picked up and amplified by the Pixel 2's impressively sensitive front-facing mics (they could literally hear me swipe on the phone, no matter how softly I touched it).
So tonight during a phone call with my long-suffering BFF, I took my phone out of its case. She immediately noticed a difference. She could no longer hear my shoes on the pavement, nor the boxes I was moving, nor the tap-tap-tapping on my phone. And for reasons unbeknownst to me, it even improved the audio when I used the mic on my Bluetooth headphones. I guess the Pixel continues to do noise-cancelling through its ambient mics even when using an external mic.
So if you're having a problem with your end of the phone conversation being garbled, try removing your phone from its case and see if it helps.
I'm gonna need to try and drill bigger openings in this case...
*So this is just a hunch, but I think the way it works is since there's two front-facing mics next to the top and bottom speakers, those tiny holes filter out ambient noise for the adjacent main mics. Which is why you need to make sure both are clear of obstructions.
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