Audio will only play at specific volumes (L820, GDR3, Black)

[Strab0]

I have a rather odd bug which started a few days ago.
My phone will only play audio at very specific volumes, for example:
Streaming through the BBC iPlayer app just now, the loudest volume I could use was 23. Switch over to xbox music and a track stored on my phone, I have to drop the volume to 14. The same seems true for any sound including ringtones, text alerts, key presses etc.

At any other volumes I just get snippets of sound about every second and a half, not enough to pick out a word/instrument, just a tick.

It seems rather bizarre and I'd upload a vid of it happening but my phone is the only thing I could use to do that.

I've tried rebooting (normally and power+volume down), leaving the battery out for a few hours, searching extensively online, changing ring/message tones (before I realised it was any audio) but nothing seems to help.

Do any of you fantastic people have any ideas? or experienced anything similar?

 

[Laura Knotek]

Did you install any new apps or updates since this problem started?

 

[Strab0]

Nothing that I can think of.
Phone has been fully up to date since the updates became available. Since noticing the issue I've uninstalled apps to free up some space and re-installed a few apps that I've noticed are affected by the problem, but nothing new was installed that could have triggered it to start.

 

[Strab0]

Problem solved! I decided it must be hardware failure of the loudspeaker after realising the phone-calls were unaffected, so did a bit more testing and then dismantled the phone to see how hard it would be to replace the speaker. When everything was reassembled the sound is working fine so I guess it was a dirty contact or dirt within the speaker unit itself

 

[crav4speed]

My wife's L820 was having a problem as well. Audio would only play at the highest level or not at all. The volume would show when I was decreasing it or increasing it but the audio itself would not decrease. There was an update for Audio so I updated it, reset the phone and it started acting normally again. She hasn't complained since.

 

[Strab0]

I saw that reported a lot when I was researching audio issues; really hope they address it's cause in 8.1