Prius v Five audio levels jump

It probably has to do with notifications that come through your phone. I have my iphone connected via BT and the volume will occasionally lower for a second as a notification comes through the phone and thus through the car system.

 

Probably the DSP setting under Audio Options. If you have DSP set to On, it tries to adjust volume up and down to compensate for ambient noise like acceleration or highway noise. Try turning DSP off or setting to a lower setting.

 

Same behavior here (quiet, pre-processing text-to-voice content), but could also be a DSP-related transient, as noted elsewhere.

 

Last I heard DSP stands for Digital Signal Processing. I think in this case we are referring to ASL, Automatic Sound Levelizer. (Didn't know "levelizer" was a word, but I quote it from my '12 Navigation manual.)

Nav updates were usually made available in November for that year, ie. November '12 for a 2012 update. I know there was a shift to January of the next year in '13 for the '12 update when they started implementing the USB updates. Discs for our '04 Sienna were still made available that November 2012. I don't know if they've moved it back to November or just kept it at January. I'm afraid I don't think it will notify you when there is an update. You'll just have to try to research if one is available when you are interested in updating, probably keeping in mind that the older update is usually pulled from the shelves around September/October for the November release, or in the shifted scenario possibly November/December for a January release. One might want to wait if they are looking around these times for the next one...

 

Of course ASL is done via DSP, so...

 

I've noticed simply driving down a highway the radio will sound like it's popping from surround-sound to low-fi... like the signal is waffling.

 

This sounds like dropping out of HD Radio and reverting to SD Radio.

 

^ +1
Check manual. You can turn off HD radio for a station and that is most often the cause for unexpected volume changes.

 

We have exactly the same issue with volume jumping for split seconds at a time especially when either breaking, accelerating or reversing.

We also have issues with:
1) Navigation voice not muting the stereo / audio volume (we had this working properly in our previous Prius version).
2) Audio volume not auto adjusting / adapting to speed etc...

Interested to know if you have the same issues and if you found any solutions.

Cheers