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Google Pixel 4a Smartphone Audio Review

Veri

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Things were very bad in Windows XP. The resampler was awful and even simple things like volume control were broken.
Has the resampler really improved though, I wonder. Would be cool to see modern measurements of that. Archimago's showing in 2015 didn't paint a pretty picture with 16/44 (resampled to 96kHz), where OS X performed better by a lot compared to Windows.
 

Soniclife

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Asking for less output is like asking that your car have 1/3 the horsepower it has today because you fear fuel consumption. You don't have to use the max output if you don't want. But if you don't have it, you can't use it. In workplace you can leave your phone plugged in and use it as a streaming player independent of your work computer and its potential corporate restrictions.

As I showed, my Samsung phone outputs three times as much so it is not like there is no precedence.
@Thomas savage as car analogies are still banned, I think some punishment is required here. Throw the book at him.
 

Soniclife

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As I showed, my Samsung phone outputs three times as much so it is not like there is no precedence.
Haven't Samsung now dropped the headphone socket? This is one of the very few current phones on the market that looks like a good phone, and still has the socket, annoyingly.
 

Thomas savage

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@Thomas savage as car analogies are still banned, I think some punishment is required here. Throw the book at him.
Just be grateful he's not banging on about being a doctor and us being patience's and collectively slaves to his wisdom and higher education!

@amirm do you think you could manage a day or two without resorting to these well worn analogies and other such vehicles that sever your continual appeals to authority?

Kind regards


Everyone on the internet.


Ps where's my pears and tomatoes you cheap skate ?
 

PeteL

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Due to the fact that my analyzer can't control the phone, I can only run one more test which is jitter:
/
Great review as always. To me the above sentence is key. We don't know and they won't tell us anything about the linearity of the amplification, or the gain structure. The thing with these extremely low power amps, they measure well, but in real life, this doesn't fully translate, in my opinion. .3V, not only .3V but current limited .3V as your voltage drop at 33 ohm shows, not only is not enough to drive inneficient headphones, but is also quite limited for efficient ones. If you'd reach .3V at 0dBFS and go down linearly from there, you wouldn't have enough volume with almost every phones out there. I've got no rigourous way to prove that, but subjectively, even with earbuds, the music sound more compressed to me on these sub 1V device, than with a proper amp. My guess is that in order to reach enough level, the dynamic range of the music content is compromised The fact that we don't hear "distortion" does NOT mean that the Highest peaks are not clipped or soft clipped or limited, or compressed. It also doesn't mean the frequency response will not be impacted in the deepest bass (that needs current) in real life. Yes you can have enough volume, but if at this confortable listening levels you don't have headroom for peaks, all these great measurments goes out the window. and you can't catch that with a sine at 1k.
 
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Soniclife

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Just be grateful he's not banging on about being a doctor and us being patience's and collectively slaves to his wisdom and higher education!

@amirm do you think you could manage a day or two without resorting to these well worn analogies and other such vehicles that sever your continual appeals to authority?

Kind regards


Everyone on the internet.


Ps where's my pears and tomatoes you cheap skate ?
Jesus Savage is big on forgiveness, lucky for him. I was expecting some sort of y front based face mask punishment.
 

Thomas savage

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Jesus Savage is big on forgiveness, lucky for him. I was expecting some sort of y front based face mask punishment.
Once you get to amirm's age the sight of faintly stained y fronts loses its impact somewhat .
 

PMDMN

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Thanks for this review. I replaced my Pixel 3a with the 4a several weeks ago. One of the first things I noticed was a marked improvement of audio quality of the 4a over the 3a. However, I'm listening through inexpensive Koss KPH 30i's and the output voltage is not an issue for me.
 

bobbooo

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Yea that's especially true now the headphone jack is becoming a thing for history to enjoy only.

This keeps being repeated, but it's really not true. Most people, realising small incremental improvements aren't worth the money, are holding onto their phones for longer periods these days before upgrading - at least two years, often three (or even more). For example, Amir still has an S8+ that was released back in 2017. And I only had an S7 until recently upgrading, with some people I know still using this model, now nearly four years old. Many also choose to buy last year's or even earlier models due to the ridiculous over-inflated release prices of modern phones as well.

This all means that a huge proportion of people are still currently using phones with headphone jacks, and likely will continue to do so for several years to come. Just take a look at top global phone sales for the last couple of years below - apart from the Apple models, every single one of them has a headphone jack:

621289.jpg

Exhicit2_v2.jpg


And that's not even counting all the users who still have phones from previous years (like Amir, and I did until recently). Then of course there are brands like LG which are thankfully continuing to equip all their new phones with headphone jacks. Even brands like Sony have brought audio jacks back with their recently announced phones. Motorola have brought jacks back to a model for which it was omitted in the previous three generations, and Nokia's latest flagships have them too. And now Google has brought it back with their Pixel 4A (and 4A 5G). This is all due to the fact that a large majority of consumers actually highly value headphone jacks in smartphones, as they are much more convenient than having to buy a separate dongle that can easily get lost or damaged, they allow simultaneous charging and headphone listening unlike dongles, do not have the potential compatibility problems some dongles have, and the remaining option for consumers, Bluetooth audio, is inferior in audio quality, connection reliability and latency, and yet another device that needs charging with limited battery life (which will also degrade over time).

I wouldn't be surprised if other brands follow Sony, Motorola, Google etc. in bringing back the headphone jack due to popular demand. Even Samsung has backtracked on design 'streamlining' before with its reintroduction of both water resistance and the microSD card slot due to the backlash it received when it omitted these features on their Galaxy S6 model. There's a similar backlash for their latest Galaxy models due to them only having USB-C audio output. In fact, recent leaks suggest Samsung may bring back the audio jack in their next flagship, the S21. The headphone jack is by no means dead, in fact it's seeing a resurgence among several big name brands. And even if it does die out, it will still have at least a few more years left out in the wild in many consumers' pockets after that.
 
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amirm

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Has the resampler really improved though, I wonder. Would be cool to see modern measurements of that. Archimago's showing in 2015 didn't paint a pretty picture with 16/44 (resampled to 96kHz), where OS X performed better by a lot compared to Windows.
Oh most definitely. Go back and test Windows XP. The side effects were so bad I could hear them in very low bit rate lossy audio!

We had severe restriction on how much CPU usage we could use for this. Remember that we are talking some 15 years ago. And Windows had to run on new and the entire installed base with much older CPUs. When we previewed this new stack and accompanying requirements for SNR and such, the PC OEMs blew a gasket and complained at the highest levels of the company. We stood our ground but that was it. Apple doesn't have OEMs to worry about and at any rate, I think Core Audio came later. iTunes resampler was awful though on Windows so it is not like they cared in general.
 

Ron Texas

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I have a Pixel 4. It's not used foe audio, but as phone I like it. @amirm thank you for another review and the tomatoes look wonderful. I have a large home on a small lot. There's no room for a vegetable garden so we concentrate on plants to set a mood.
 

restorer-john

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That anaemic power output is hardly worth the headphone socket it comes out of. This is 2020.

As a 4 year old, I had a small National (Matsushita) pocket 5 transistor AM radio in 1970 that happily drove my dad's speakers via the 1/8" earphone jack. I remember listening to the cricket broadcast on his big Empire 9000M speakers, driven by the tiny radio on the loungeroom carpet.

One day several years later I decided to shoot my radio with my 0.22 BSA air rifle. I immediately felt really bad and repaired the shattered PCB and components. It needed a new tuning capacitor, a switched 5k volume pot and a few resistors. They all came from a shop called "Amateur's Paradise" (full on electronic amateur radio shop) I think, that was the first electronic restoration for me.
 
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Degru

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Has the resampler really improved though, I wonder. Would be cool to see modern measurements of that. Archimago's showing in 2015 didn't paint a pretty picture with 16/44 (resampled to 96kHz), where OS X performed better by a lot compared to Windows.
I actually double-checked this a while back since I thought those measurements were too awful to be true, and indeed they were: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...indows-resampling-not-actually-that-bad.9092/

I only had a laptop sound card to measure with but still sufficient to disprove those results.
 

bobbooo

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Haven't Samsung now dropped the headphone socket? This is one of the very few current phones on the market that looks like a good phone, and still has the socket, annoyingly.

There are loads of other options for good current phones with headphone jacks, e.g. one of the Samsung Galaxy S10 series.
 

restorer-john

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So this does look like a software issue, that could be fixed with an update.

So a brand new phone needs a software update to get decent level out of its own headphone socket. Unbelievable.

Give me real HiFi anyday. And, get off my lawn. ;)
 
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amirm

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amirm

amirm

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Android certification spec for 3.5mm headset jack is max 150mv RMS playing weighted pink noise (IEC 268) into 32 ohms at max volume to pass the European EN50332-2 test specification.

https://source.android.com/devices/accessories/headset/jack-headset-spec
https://www.listeninc.com/products/...suring-spl-of-portable-devices-to-en-50332-2/
Hmmm, my read is that 150 mv is the minimum:

1601192637550.png


It says the drive voltage should be greater than or equal to 150 millivolts on 32 ohm load. I measured 270 millivolts on the Pixel 4a so that must be the correct reading.
 
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