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Mobile phones and sound quality

vert

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old post and old article. GSMarena stopped testing audio too. I found one for Note 9. Not for Note 10 or S10.
They did have an audio quality section for those. Not the same tests as before, do you mean?
 

Julf

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I have several personal reasons...

I use a phone for many purposes and I don't want my choice of phone constrained by the audio components within in it (e.g. many new flagship phones do not have a 3.5mm jack and none have the 2.5mm balanced jack for my IEMs)

I find that cables wear out very quickly when plugged straight into a phone - I commute for 2 hours per day on foot and via train, so sometimes the phone is in my hand, other times it's in my pocket, having the phone joined to my ears via a cable is a PITA.

I can pair my ES100 with both my Note 9 and my Huawei tablet (which doesn't have 3.5mm audio).

Fair enough - but I don't understand the hype around balanced headphone cables.
 

STUDIO51

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http://underkg.co.kr/opinion

Here is the smartphone sound quality data I measured. It is written in Korean, but there will be no problem reading the graph. Use Google Translator if needed

LG : G6 V30 G7 V40

Samsung : S8 N8 S9 N9

Apple : I8 XS XSMAX

Recently, the sound quality of most smartphones is satisfactory. However, smartphone speaker performance still differs. Apple is always the best, Samsung is a bit lacking, and LG is disappointing.
 

BDWoody

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http://underkg.co.kr/opinion

Here is the smartphone sound quality data I measured. It is written in Korean, but there will be no problem reading the graph. Use Google Translator if needed

LG : G6 V30 G7 V40

Samsung : S8 N8 S9 N9

Apple : I8 XS XSMAX

Recently, the sound quality of most smartphones is satisfactory. However, smartphone speaker performance still differs. Apple is always the best, Samsung is a bit lacking, and LG is disappointing.

Am I reading this wrong? Where's the disappointing part?

" In general, the G7, which is used for listening with earphones and headphones, showed a very good measurement, which is higher than most other high-end digital audio players. The high distortion (THD, IMD), low levels of crosstalk, and frequency response of the earphone mode seen in the last V30 were worth noting. But this G7 is a very good case that keeps all of this intact. "

I don't know...it measured pretty well for Amir.
 

BDWoody

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http://underkg.co.kr/opinion

Here is the smartphone sound quality data I measured. It is written in Korean, but there will be no problem reading the graph. Use Google Translator if needed

LG : G6 V30 G7 V40

Samsung : S8 N8 S9 N9

Apple : I8 XS XSMAX

Recently, the sound quality of most smartphones is satisfactory. However, smartphone speaker performance still differs. Apple is always the best, Samsung is a bit lacking, and LG is disappointing.

Ahhh...SPEAKER performance...i see.
Who listens on the speaker?
Sorry 'bout that.
Cheers.
 

STUDIO51

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Am I reading this wrong? Where's the disappointing part?

" In general, the G7, which is used for listening with earphones and headphones, showed a very good measurement, which is higher than most other high-end digital audio players. The high distortion (THD, IMD), low levels of crosstalk, and frequency response of the earphone mode seen in the last V30 were worth noting. But this G7 is a very good case that keeps all of this intact. "

I don't know...it measured pretty well for Amir.

Most people, including amirm, don't do all the sound quality measurements on LG & SAMSUNG smartphones.

LG, SAMSUNG doesn't have simple high quality dac and low quality dac mode. They detect the resistance and change three modes: earphone mode, headphone mode and lineout mode.This mode is difficult to circumvent because it is built into the dac chip codec. You can check this in my post

The G6 showed low crosstalk performance in earphone mode. (-47dB) G7 shows good quality The only thing I mentioned disappointing is the speaker. You may not care about the speaker of the smartphone, but the manufacturer is currently focusing on the speaker of the smartphone. LG has a feature called boombox, but it's useless, and the receiver at the top is far inferior to SAMSUNG and Apple.I'm working at underkg as a comprehensive audio reviewer. It is reasonable to care about the performance of the speakers.
 

bravomail

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It is reasonable to care about the performance of the speakers.

It is not going to be possible for phone manufacturers to circumvent laws of physics. Low freq sounds (bass and subbass) will be impossible for phone speakers to reproduce. And speaker itslef being piezoelectric - it will have heavy distortions everywhere. It is losing streak, no matter, if u care or not about phone speaker quality. The quality is simply not there to begin with. Are you expecting any serious audiophile to listen to its music via phone's speakerphone? It works as a handicap at best, when noone is around to complain about loud noise (or you are sharing with the group), and you don't have your headphones or don't care about sound - say, just watching some youtube video.
 
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