Does higher volume on a phone drain more power if it’s via Bluetooth?

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So I assume, that if I just have my phone and play music, it would drain more power, the louder I make the music.

Now if I connect my phone to the car, I have two ways of increasing volume. One time via the car’s stereo and again via the volume increase on my phone.

I am always wondering, if I would put the volume on my phone lower and the cars volume louder, will this effectively safe battery of my phone? Or does it not matter as the signal is digital and volume is just a bit in the transmission?

Maybe someone can this for me 🙂

In: Technology

3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

It matters with a physical headphone connection, yes. Like if you had a headphone jack and connected to headphones or even your car’s aux. A higher volume through those methods would lead to a higher battery drain, because a higher output voltage = higher volume.

When you change the volume on your phone for Bluetooth, depending on how Bluetooth is implemented on the receiving device, your phone will either send one additional command over the Bluetooth data stream to tell the device to change the volume, or changes the volume value that it sends in each music packet. In either case, you’re either sending a miniscule amount of additional data each time you change the volume (up or down) or it’s a digital value that gets sent alongside the music regardless of volume level. The value of which won’t change your power consumption. So with Bluetooth, volume level doesn’t matter. Bringing an entire radio online to transmit/receive Bluetooth data does matter, however.

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