Voice Assistant PE - Voice is Left channel only, Music is Dual channel / Stereo

The voice assistant’s audible voice is only on the Left channel. However, if I ask for the unit to play music, it’s in stereo (L+R channels).

I don’t suppose there is a way for the PE voice to be mono (to be clear, panned center with audio on both channels) or at least duplicated on the Right channel?

Yes, a voice is normally mono when recorded, but when you sit in front of stereo speakers all day and the voice only comes out of one speaker…it could be improved.

Is the 3.5 mm jack fully inserted? The plastic case of the VAPE has a hole that does not allow the connector housing of a 3.5 mm male to protrude inside. And female on the PCB inside is not close enough to the front so the receptable protrude. The result is that most 3.5 mm jacks do not properly connect.

I had to drill out the hole in the plastic on all my 3 boxes. When I plugged headphones I got the speech in mono.

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Interesting!

When music is played, both channels sound fine. I even tried a different 3.5mm to dual RCA adapter - same issue. I would expect there to be some issues if the VAPE case prevented the cable from being fully inserted.

I’d do some experimentation - but if a dev could chime in on the expected behavior, that may save me drilling into the case.

I use my voice assistant always connected to line out and I noticed a bad connection that resulted in single channel output. Based on the recommendation here, I took it apart, drilled a larger hole for the 3.5mm jack, and it’s working well now. Hopefully, the designers will look here for improvements for hardware v2.

Wow, that’s crazy, but I appreciate the confirmation.

Have the Nabu Casa folks been notified?

I think some pictures with the larger hole and with the 3.5mm jack you have would increase the motivation for a future HA Voice case improvement.



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I finally had time to do this…and yup, that fixed it. The 3.5mm jack on the board isn’t close enough to the edge of the plastic body, so enlarging the hole in the plastic body means the audio cable can be pushed in farther, yielding full 2 channel audio.