LG Cellphone Earpiece Compatibility

I recently acquired an LG Optimus F3Q, because it had the desirable property of being the only phone with a keyboard that I could get.

It also had the undesirable property of not working very well with any of my existing headsets - the audio sounded staticy and distorted on my end. The only headset they worked with it was a Dr. Dre Beats, but they had an inline microphone on the cord instead of a boom microphone, so other peole were regularly unable to hear me when I used it.

I spent a long time barking up the wrong tree, carefully measuring the impedance of the headsets which worked and didn't work. It turns out the answer is very simple. Some headsets which have only one speaker SHORT the unused channel. Also, some 3.5mm to 2.5mm adapters assume tip-ring-ring-sleeve on the 2.5mm end, but the 2.5mm headset actually just has tip-ring-sleeve, so the 2nd ring gets shorted to ground.

It appears that the LG Optimus driver can't deal very well with one of the channels being shorted, and it distorts on the other channel.

You can fix this with a piece of tape so that the unused channel is open instead of shorted. Use thin tape and wrap it exactly one turn; if it overlaps, it's likely to be too thick to fit.

Illustrated Tape Placement
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