XL 350M No Longer Announcing Directions Reliably. How to Fix?

[kc27]

Hello All

I am looking for some advice on a GPS where the spoken directions are no longer working correctly.

My XL 350M has become very unreliable when announcing turn-by-turn directions. This was like an overnight change. It worked fine one day, and now it doesn't work properly anymore. I hadn't done anything to the unit, and it hasn't been dropped or otherwise accidentally mistreated. It's only been in use for two months, too.

The on-screen navigation is working fine, but announcing of turn-by-turn directions is consistently exhibiting some or all of these problems:

1. Announces the first turn in the route, then is sllent for the rest of the route.

2 Announces the first turn, then intermittently announces some but not all of the other turns in the route.

3. If it does announce a turn, it announces the turn just as you are entering the intersection rather than announcing it before you reach the turn.

4. It only plays the first half of the announced turn directions.

5. Does't give the additional directions such as "continue on route 38 for..."

I did reset the unit from the on-screen menu, but that didn't help. Is there anything else I can try?

Thanks in advance for any help on this.

 

[canderson]

Just for grins, drop your volume control down to 80% or under and see if things magically improve.

 

[kc27]

canderson

Thanks for the suggestion. That solved the problem. Do you know why 100% volume is problematic?

I thought I had used the XL 350M in the past at 100% volume with no problems, but maybe I was mistaken.

Again, thanks for your help in figuring this out.

 

[canderson]

canderson

Thanks for the suggestion. That solved the problem. Do you know why 100% volume is problematic?

It's the current firmware that caused it. There are quite a number of people waiting on that fix.

As to why it happens -- I could only guess based upon some old history of how TomTom did some things in previous units. If there's a voltage dip sensed, it seems the TomTom will attempt to preserve battery a bit, and shutting off the audio is one of those things. The audio may be causing just enough of a drop at high volume (even when plugged in to a power source) that it's being sensed and the unit starts to disable the audio. Like I say, it's only a guess. Back in the "old days", we had instances where there would be no audio at all at lower battery levels. That's the only reason I'd even suggest that they've goofed with the voltage threshold in the firmware, and that this might be causing it.

 

[mikealder]

Higher volume used to make the screen backlight pulse as the device issued instructions, making the 100% point quieter in terms of volume made the screen backlight less prone to pulsing - Mike

 

[kc27]

It's the current firmware that caused it.

Thanks for passing this along - at least there is a logical explanation as to why it worked at full volume before and does not now.

 

[mikealder]

Just for information this silent at or above 85% volume also affects the European XL-IQ_2 models - Mike

 

[jpa4]

That's interesting. I purchased an xl 350 tm last week and the speech did not work consistently as described above. I contacted tomtom and they gave me a few suggestions to fix but none worked and they did not suggest a firmware problem or dropping the volume to correct the problem. Hopefully this works for me as well.
Thanks for your help!

 

[canderson]

FWIW, we have one user who reports receiving confirmation that TomTom has a fix in hand for the 85% issue for a future release of firmware. Have no idea when that will happen, of course.