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Google Confirms Small Number of Pixel Phones Have Broken Microphones (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report on The Verge: Google says that a small number of Pixel phones have broken microphones that need to be sent back for replacement. The issue is seemingly not that widespread. Google claims the issue is present on less than 1 percent of devices -- the company also announced that it would replace defective phones last month, and it went largely unnoticed until now. Google says the primary cause for Pixels having microphone issues is a "hairline crack in the solder connection on the audio codec," which causes all three of the device's mics to go out at once. The issue has apparently been known about for several months now. Google says it's been "taking additional steps to reinforce the connection" since January and that phones built or refurbished since then should be fine.
The NSA and CIA are going to want a refund.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
Why is this news. Manufacturers have defects all of the time. It's a small number of phones. Who cares!
It's not like they randomly bust into flames or anything.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
With a Pixel. About 2 weeks ago, so hopefully it won't have this defect.
Best Slashdot Co
"hairline crack in the solder connection on the audio codec,"
A codec is software, who knew software could have a hairline crack in the solder?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Codec is short for encode/decode. So a hardware codec would be a chip that performs encoding and decoding of an audio stream. They probably could have used a software codec and ran it on the CPU, but seemingly instead opted to use a hardware codec that would be more optimized for the particular algorithm they were using.
when you needed to make a critical call
Wait, what? You use your phone to do what? What's a "call?" Is it free in the app store?
"hairline crack in the solder connection on the audio codec"
This is what happens when you ban lead in solder.
A slight miscalibration or unaccounted for solder shadowing and the joint will form brittle then pull itself apart.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Codecs can be implemented both in hardware and software.
Codecs for high quality compressed speech codes can be computationally intensive and so may be better done in hardware.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
You can make phone calls on the Pixel Phones as well?
It does. The part in the Pixel is(I think) a Qualcomm; but they are annoying as hell to get datasheets for; so these examples are Realtek:
Here are their I2S codecs(what you'd likely find in a cellphone or similar device); and here are the Intel HDA ones; as you'd see in a PC. Unless you are doing something particularly fancy(in which case the an offboard DSP might actually be worth the trouble); the main purpose appears to be allowing you to decouple the ADCs and DACs(which aren't necessarily well suited to being fabbed on the process that makes the most sense for a SoC or PC chipset; and which can vary widely in number and quality depending on the desired features of the product, which would lead to nasty SKU proliferation) from the SoC or chipset; with just a simple, versatile, digital data link between the two chips, allowing the SoC or chipset to support a wide variety of audio configurations with just one design; and allowing the device vendor to get their choice of features and performance(anywhere from a single mic, single audio out, lousy ADC and DAC quality; up to zillions-of-peripherals-and-golden-eared-audiophile-DACs) just by attaching a different codec chip.
The most spartan designs might not need a 'codec' at all(you can get MEMs mics that speak I2S directly, with the analog support circutry integrated into the package; and you can also get audio amps/speaker/headphone drivers that speak I2S directly and have a DAC onboard, rather than accepting a low voltage analog audio input); but if you've got a mic array, a speaker, headphone/mic jack, line out, etc. a codec can bundle up all the support for the various analog interfaces and allow you to attach them all to the SoC/chipset with a single digital bus.
In this case, the fact that it's a codec soldering issue is presumably why all three mics die at once. That would be seriously unlikely if the mics themselves failed; but the codec handles all the mics, so a failure there knocks out the mics in roughly the same way that just yanking out a soundcard would.
1% of 3,000,000 = 30,000 really pissed off customers.
If it was far less than 1%, they would have told us it was "less than .01%" or something like that.
Source for sold numbers:
http://www.pcworld.com/article...
Actually, for microphones, you don't usually use analog ones hooked to a codec providing the data via I2S in modern phones.
You use "digital microphones" that output PDM coded audio directly (PDM = pulse density modulation - the higher the signal value, the closer the pulses are together). PDM has a trade name of DSD (Direct Stream Digital) as it's the format used by Soper Audio CD and "1-bit DACs". (They only output 1s and 0s, the density of 1s describes the signal level).
This lets you connect up an array of microphones (usually at least 3 on modern phones) using minimal pins and support electronics - a PDM microphone takes just 2 wires - clock (in) and data (out), and if you have an array, they can share a clock line so your 3 microphones use just 4 lines.
A crack on the clock line would easily disable all the microphones.