Sean’s Rant

So if you use Pandora on the Instinct, you have noticed that the sound is very low in the headphone setting.

There is an actual hack in the phone to change the maximum volume setting, which requires messing with the programming in your phone. Not many people want to go through this. If you do here you go – This is an excerpt from a post on Buzz About Wireless.

I tried doing the hack mentioned there and it did increase the volume for calls, but not for Pandora. If your interested see the below:

Do the following at your own risk. (I did it)

“Enter test mode from dialer by entering:
47*869#1235

Enter code 078, these seem to be volume settings:

PCS HAND SPK 000
PCS HEAD SPK 120
PCS AHFK SPK 000
PCS SPKR SPK 120
PCS BTEM SPK 040
CEL HAND SPK 000
CEL HEAD SPK 120
CEL AHFK SPK 000
CEL SPKR SPK 120
CEL BTERM SPK 040

AHFK stands for Auto Hands Free Kit
Increasing it increases headphone volume.

The range on these values is 0 to 120

Volume button on side, up/down to move from one volume setting to the next, then type-in the new value and the Done button. Press # then 002 to get out.

 WARNING don’t mess with any thing else in there it could brick your phone”

It is nice when its on speaker mode. In the case of using it for a car, I plug it into the aux input for my new stereo that has an aux input on the front. When using it for headphones, there is a (Non Programming) hack for that too. 

So the (Non Programming) hack for the car input is to pull out the headphone jack that goes to your stereo aux input slightly so that it plays out of the speakers on the phone and the car, and when doing this it changes the output to the car so that it is louder and has more of a stereo sound than when plugged in all the way. This does use more battery because of the speakers on the phone being used but its worth it for the sound quality difference. Even with the volume at full on the stereo, it is still very quiet with the headphone jack plugged in all the way. 

For the headphone hack, I got noise cancelling headphones. These are nice for work too if you work in a noisy environment, and don’t want to blast your ears trying to out-noise the noise. This allows for lower volume and thus saves your ears too. With the noise cancelling headphones, you can hear the pandora just fine and could even try the same hack as for the car, but this might not be as environment friendly as you walk around blaring your music for everyone.

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