Volume normalisation issue with Nothing Phone (3) speakers

joshuacsliu

Something that I have noticed with the Nothing Phone (3) when playing music using the phone speakers is that the phone seems to automatically normalise the volume of music playing.

When loud parts of a song play, the phone reduces the volume of the music. When a quiet part of the song plays, the volume of the music increases again. No equalisers have been enabled on the phone and the actual volume notches on the phone does not change.

I have tested YouTube Music and also offline music files and this behaviour affects both.

Has anyone else with the Nothing Phone (3) noticed this behaviour when playing music?

Video of the issue:

MarieMM

I have a similar problem and I desperately need a fix:

When I connect to external speakers via the USB 3 cable, the phone works TOO hard to normalize the sound. The start of each sound goes extremely loud. Within 5-10 seconds, the volume drops back to normal … and during the song, the volume even gets clearly lower than normal.

This cannot be explained by any touching/contact with the phone. I’m 10 meters away from it and nothing else is touching it.

ADDED: @joshuacsliu , is there any progress on your side? Did you report the error through the feedback menue on the phone? We are discussing it here as well:
#44093

ashokram

yep recently purchased ph3 two weeks ago and I do feel it it way too loud in some cases very annoying need to adjust volume accordingly every time

WX580

Can vouch for this too, have the same issue at night trying to fall asleep to music, doesn't matter what app I use 😔

MarieMM

WX580

ashokram

I hope that you could report this to Nothing officially, using the "feedback" menu item in your phone's settings. I haven't received any follow-up since they confirmed the problem…

ritwik2000

Having the same problem. Need a fix asap.

HollowPickle

Same issue here. When playing music through AUX every song starts normal volume and then drops to barely audible. I had hoped NOS 4.0 would have fixed this issue but no joy.

Nenrikido

This issue is still up, 8 months later …

np3user2026

Hello! Is there any solution ? Still having this problem (July 2026).

joshuacsliu

np3user2026

Sadly still no fix that I know of

HassamUddin

joshuacsliu

joshuacsliu I face sams issue

Ferrig

joshuacsliu у меня тоже phone 3 и при первоначальной настройки я видел пункт о таком сглаживании звука, где он находится я не помню, но возможно это вам поможет

Kuraseyoz

Same issue here on a NP3. Tried searching for any smoothing settings but I can’t find anything similar that would fix it. The only thing I found is audio lowering when TalkBack is being used and there’s music in the background. But if it is disabled, I imagine it shouldn’t be a problem. I will continue having a look, but I imagine such feature shouldn’t be hard to find, knowing it affects how media plays through the speaker

DuskoDutina

Facing the same issue, NP3. Wondering if there is any third part equalizer app to fix this…

BotFred

Same here and its frustrating 🙁

Beanow

I think I’ve found the cause, and a workaround.

Confirming the issue
Had the same issue on Speakers, and SteelSeries Arctis 9 USB receiver in Playstation mode. But didn’t have the issue on Arctis 9 usb in PC mode, nor Bluetooth earbuds.

It sounds like a gradual volume change. Increasing gain during quiet parts, decreasing gain during loud parts. (In addition to other EQ effects when you force it off with my workaround.)

I’ve had the issue on Nothing OS 4.0 as well. However I did the deeper investigation and testing of workaround on Nothing OS 4.1. (Build: Metroid-B4.1-260814-1733-EEA)

Workaround
What you want to know, how to turn it off?

1. Get ADB access to your device (no root needed).
2. Force disable the “Audio effects” like so:
adb shell am stopservice -n com.nothing.audioeffect/.AudioEffectControlService
adb shell am startservice -n com.nothing.audioeffect/.AudioEffectControlService
sleep 1
adb shell pm disable-user --user 0 com.nothing.audioeffect
adb shell am stopservice -n com.nothing.audioeffect/.AudioEffectControlService
adb shell am crash --user 0 com.nothing.audioeffect

This should forcibly disable the hidden, privileged, system package com.nothing.audioeffect
The restart/crash shenanigans are necessary because it’s a system service that’s supposed to always run and restart automatically. This sequence reliably stopped it for me though.

You can run this while audio is playing (through speakers) and you should hear the change in real-time like it’s an EQ change.

Restoring to normal
If you applied the workaround, you can restore normal behavior easily.

1. Get ADB access to your device (no root needed).
2. Enable the package again with:

adb shell pm enable --user 0 com.nothing.audioeffect
adb shell am startservice -n com.nothing.audioeffect/.AudioEffectControlService

3. Pause/resume audio or restart your audio app for changes to take effect.

What’s happening (I think)

The Nothing Phone (3), and maybe other devices, uses a proprietary post-processing effect by AAC (not the codec, but AAC Technologies / Didac “Power Sound engine”).
It’s supposed to create an enhanced profile for the speakers. And in my opinion after comparing the before/after with this workaround, it does do that. If only it would stop messing with the gain like this I’d be happy with it and keep this on.

So I think there are two problems Nothing should fix:

The gain control is annoying and should be turned off, or drastically reduced.
Some USB devices are incorrectly applying the effect as well.

This is technology for boosting the speakers. So applying it to external USB speakers is a bug. In my case the SteelSeries Arctis 9 USB receiver is kind of unique because it has a “PC mode” and “Playstation mode” with a switch on it. Setting it to Playstation mode causes the bug (speaker boost effect on external audio). While the PC mode (and Bluetooth buds) is fine.

Apps to work around it

DuskoDutina
FWIW I did try several equalizer and “Bit-perfect audio” apps. But it looks like my workaround will only work with ADB right now. No nice user-friendly workaround. But by sharing what I found hopefully Nothing can get to fixing it properly this time.

DuskoDutina

What do you think, will Nothing OS 5.0/Android 17 fix this?

Beanow

DuskoDutina Because this is entirely from a custom effect Nothing applied updating Android by itself wouldn’t solve anything. On the positive side, that means they could fix it in any update like a 4.2 as well.

DuskoDutina

Beanow Hey, I did this, I don’t know if I’m tripping from the constant checking ahahaha, but I think it worked. Thanks!