• WANTED: Happy members who like to discuss audio and other topics related to our interest. Desire to learn and share knowledge of science required. There are many reviews of audio hardware and expert members to help answer your questions. Click here to have your audio equipment measured for free!

Sony Xperia 5 IV Audio Review

Rate this smartphone audio

  • 1. Poor (headless panther)

    Votes: 32 22.9%
  • 2. Not terrible (postman panther)

    Votes: 68 48.6%
  • 3. Fine (happy panther)

    Votes: 29 20.7%
  • 4. Great (golfing panther)

    Votes: 11 7.9%

  • Total voters
    140

danadam

Addicted to Fun and Learning
Joined
Jan 20, 2017
Messages
956
Likes
1,496
IEMs is what I use so these phones are fine for me.
I wonder if there are cables for IEMs that end with USB-C plug (analog pass-through) instead of jack?
 

starfly

Senior Member
Forum Donor
Joined
Jun 6, 2019
Messages
353
Likes
288
Ha, I bought this same phone a few months ago and returned it because I thought it was actually too small. Was very hard to type on that very narrow screen. It's an odd aspect ratio. I really wanted to get another phone with a headphone jack, but the Sony just wasn't it. Also tried the Xperia 1 IV, but that is just too expensive for what it is, and only offers 2 years of software updates.

I've resigned myself to the fact that I'll need to use dongles going forward, so I got an iPhone instead, though I'm contemplating going back to Android as I can just do more with Android than I can with iPhone. I have to jump through all kinds of weird hoops on this iPhone to do the things I used to do on my Android phone. Nothing super advanced either, but iPhone is just oddly restrictive with what they allow you to do with it.
 

GXAlan

Major Contributor
Forum Donor
Joined
Jan 15, 2020
Messages
3,868
Likes
5,954

pantherluv

New Member
Joined
Feb 1, 2021
Messages
3
Likes
6
Location
Tucson
I have some fond memories of my Sony Walkman w800i.. The LG phones can still be had for cheap, but no security updates,etc
I'm curious, I have two V30s, both off Ebay, that work pretty well for streaming. Why would you need security updates for that application?
 

eddantes

Addicted to Fun and Learning
Joined
May 15, 2020
Messages
706
Likes
1,382
I am not looking for fidelity -- just convenience of not having to charge a wireless earbud, or needing a dongle for normal headphones.

The whole reason this is forced on us is to upsell what you say: a wireless earbud. There is no technical reason to have taken out the 3.5mm jack as evidenced by this flagship phone having plenty of room for it.

Let's remember that my current phone has this. And its performance is quite good despite its age. For just a bit more performance, I don't want to give up this jack.

Almost tempted to get a Samsung S10 which was the last generation with headphone jack. Alas, it has no 5G support. :( And security fixes will no longer be coming post this quarter.
In that case for 20 bucks, I'd just get these USB-C earbuds and a decent (non-apple) phone




1674232116701.png
 
Last edited:

BostonJack

Active Member
Editor
Joined
Jul 2, 2019
Messages
288
Likes
350
Location
Boston area, Cambridge, MA
I am not looking for fidelity -- just convenience of not having to charge a wireless earbud, or needing a dongle for normal headphones.

The whole reason this is forced on us is to upsell what you say: a wireless earbud. There is no technical reason to have taken out the 3.5mm jack as evidenced by this flagship phone having plenty of room for it.

Let's remember that my current phone has this. And its performance is quite good despite its age. For just a bit more performance, I don't want to give up this jack.

Almost tempted to get a Samsung S10 which was the last generation with headphone jack. Alas, it has no 5G support. :( And security fixes will no longer be coming post this quarter.
Convenience is important. I use a Quedelix occasionally with TruthEar IEMs. Even that is super good enough audio quality, but just the number of items + chargeable devices = annoying.

Skiing is worse! I use Carv, a ski training AI-ish device with two small boxes, one on each boot. Carv requires Bluetooth headphones and smart phone app to run, so that is: two small boxes permanently attached to boots, iphone, and bluetook headphones in helmet, all of which have to be charged up and interconnected.

We are living in the future and have way more batteries to charge then is healthy.
 

ManuCV

Member
Joined
Apr 3, 2021
Messages
81
Likes
61
This matches my experience with the Xperia Pro-I. Fantastic phone overall, great main camera, but it has a dismal output power. I had to use a dongle from day 1 in order to get some volume out of it. The Qudelix 5K has been a godsend for me.
 

Robbo99999

Master Contributor
Forum Donor
Joined
Jan 23, 2020
Messages
6,874
Likes
6,672
Location
UK
Yep. Like the new(ish) iBasso DC03PRO. Very cheap and imho very good. But I assume Amir knows that it is possible to combine a Galaxy 22Ultra with a dongle.
@amirm , I'd quite like to see another cheap dongle review roundup. There's plenty of cheap USB-C dongles available on Amazon for instance - it would be interesting to see you do a roundup of a variety of the cheap & popular ones that are available both for you in the USA and here in UK/Europe.

For instance, I've got the following one that is super cheap and I think I worked out it goes to 1V:
Then there's a variety of others available that seem popular:

There just seems so many of them, reviewing the most popular ones could be useful. Perhaps there is a lot of crossover of parts used in many of these cheap dongles, maybe it would be useful for people to know what to look for & which parts measure well if anything can be gleaned from the specs in the store front. Maybe there's some real gems amoungst the cheap available USB-C dongles apart from the Apple Dongle which you've already measured.
 

Futility

Member
Forum Donor
Joined
Jul 31, 2019
Messages
48
Likes
112
Location
TX
My experience with Xperia Pro-I, which is an even higher end (and more expensive) phone, is similar to Amir's.

I was very happy with my previous LG V30 phone but phone company was forcing me to upgrade due to 3G network shutdown. Alas, LG exited cell phone business. I also wanted a phone with a headphone jack, expandable card slot and good sound and camera. Flagship Pro-I doesn't have wireless charging and at the time I didn't care enough for it. The only other phone I was considering was Asus RoG phone which features Sabre DAC and a mini-jack. Its gamer-focus esthetics weren't very appealing to me but I could live with them if not for poor phone availability in the US at the time. So, I chose to give Xperia Pro-I a shot.

The phone is nicely built but echo many of Amir's sentiments about its usability.

Screen narrowness makes text reading more uncomfortable, though after half a year I adapted to it.
Camera is not as spectacular as I hoped it would be but I am picky, being a pro portrait photographer.
Sound is good both with IEMs and bluetooth streaming; LDAC to D90SE, as mentioned by @Svensson is fantastic.

I wouldn't recommend the phone at retail price but when heavily discounted it's a worthy quality device, despite some nitpicks.

I wish someone who owns an Asus RoG phone could share their experience with it for comparison with Sony.
 

Robbo99999

Master Contributor
Forum Donor
Joined
Jan 23, 2020
Messages
6,874
Likes
6,672
Location
UK
Every time I see something like that, can't help but makes me think of how much of a bunch of misfit weirdos us audiophiles are. Truth is, and the market trends are very clear, at least 95% of music lovers are totally, fully satisfied with listening trough a Bluetooth connection and in in the vast majority, lower bit rates ones. And many of those are very passionate about music, many spend way more time than me listening to music, love their music. Can they all be missing out that much? What are we chasing really? does this obsession to go get this very last bit of extra fidelity actually is a real benefit in actual enjoyment, ore are we just at a point where it's about well if I really really concentrate and do very critical listening I am able to detect a slight hint that my listening has less distortion than yours, kinda thing, but if you just sit back and enjoy, the music effectively sounds just as good and we are just biased into thinking we get something significantly better?
It's an obsessive hobby that to some extent can go beyond just musical enjoyment. For me I really enjoy optimising my equipment through purchase choice & EQ & setup, and then you've got the joy of just listening to music on top of that. At some point though when everything is fully optimised then realistically it's just about the music.
 
OP
amirm

amirm

Founder/Admin
Staff Member
CFO (Chief Fun Officer)
Joined
Feb 13, 2016
Messages
44,368
Likes
234,388
Location
Seattle Area
Do you have DSEE HX enabled or any of those Walkman features? My old Xperia had that on by default.
I disabled all audio features including that.
 
Joined
Mar 28, 2020
Messages
70
Likes
139
Location
Baltimore
You’re right, it should be lower honestly.

0.5 volts is enough for 110dB on most IEMs, 100 dB on most headphones. No Kid should be exposed to that.

I think those regulations are based on occupational noise exposure levels, A-weighted. Which is silly for headphones/earphones and music.
I don't believe for a second those regulators and bureaucrats know what they are doing
 

abdo123

Master Contributor
Forum Donor
Joined
Nov 15, 2020
Messages
7,424
Likes
7,940
Location
Brussels, Belgium
I think those regulations are based on occupational noise exposure levels, A-weighted. Which is silly for headphones/earphones and music.
I don't believe for a second those regulators and bureaucrats know what they are doing

There is no universe where extended exposure to these levels as a kid is acceptable.
 

evert

Member
Joined
Oct 11, 2021
Messages
47
Likes
10
This is a review and detailed measurements of the Sony Xperia 5 IV high-end smartphone audio performance. I purchased it recently for US $799 but I see normal price of $998.
View attachment 258434
I went through extensive search for a month to find a replacement for my aging Samsung S8+. I wanted a phone with analog out, OLED high-resolution display, wireless charging and 5G. Believe it or not, in US, this translates to only two phones, both from Sony. The Xperia 5 Mark IV and Xperia 1 Mark IV. I read all the reviews of these with people only complaining about overheating and complicated camera app. Turns out the overheating is only caused by recording 4K video for a while, something I never do.

Another critique was the cost of the 1 Mark IV. Thinking the 5 Mark IV is just lower res version, I purchased it, not realizing it actually has slightly smaller display. This, turns out to be a showstopper. You can't quite tell from above picture but these phones from Sony are quite narrow with an aspect ratio of 21:9. Normal HDTV is 16:9. What this means is that if you watch 99% of online content (other than movies), you wind up with significant black bars on each side. This is not much of an issue with OLED displays given their strong blacks. However, your video frame is now quite small. You can zoom in to use the full screen but now you lose top and bottom of the display. Forget about reading subtitles for example as they get half chopped off. Online video consumption is a huge part of my mobile phone use so this is really bad hit as far as usability for me.

The problem is not limited to video. I also consumer a lot of text in the form of accessing the forum, news, etc. The vertical resolution is good but horizontally, you have a lot less pixels. What this means is that hardly anything fits in one line. Article headings as a result wrap to next line, causing much less content to be visible at any one time.

As you all know, mobiles phones have grown in recent years. I thought then that I would get a replacement phone that is at least as big as my current one. This is not the case. the Sony is narrower than my Samsung S8+ and shows less content per above.

Something that is absent from many reviews is the RF/radio performance of these phones. I did not enable the radio in the Sony but did test its Wifi. I was so surprised that it had shorter range than my Samsung! 30 or so feet from my enterprise class Wifi (Ubiquiti Unifi), the Sony would completely lose connection whereas my Samsung would keep going, producing 40+ mibt/sec throughput. This location is one of our bathroom where, ahem, I do a lot of browsing. :)

Sony talks a lot about its cameras and as the leader in camera sensors, I expected better. I tested just one low light telephoto shot. The image was full of noise and very soft. Nothing remotely approaching a proper camera. So all the "Pro" features of the camera app is lost on me.

For above reasons, I will be returning the Xperia 5 MK IV. Sad because this phone checks a lot of boxes with SD card expansion, 120 Hz OLED display, good battery life, easy to fit in hand, etc. Before doing so, I thought I measure its audio performance in case above issues are not a problem for you.

Sony Xperia 5 IV Audio Measurements
As usual, I am limited in what I can measure on phones as my audio analyzer can't control them. And there is a gray area as far as what the Android Audio stack is doing (likely resampling to 48 kHz which is as dumb as similar decision in Windows). I first started testing using Roon player for Android, playing the same 1 KHz 24-bit tone:
View attachment 258436

I don't see any signs of poor bit depth/sample rate conversion which is good. SINAD of 98 dB is very good for the type of device. FFT spectrum shows distortion products below -105 dB which shows attention to implementation here. I tried to do the same test using the included media player which I am assuming is from Sony:
View attachment 258437

I don't understand why the distortion spectrum changed as resampling does not do that. Alas, despite improvement in distortion, overall SINAD actually drops by a few dBs indicating noise floor is higher.

What was very disappointing was the max output voltage of 0.5 volts. This directly translates to low output power especially with 300 ohm load. I cannot run my sweeps but did measure the max power:
View attachment 258439


View attachment 258438

As you see, these are dismal results, worsened at 33 ohm with high, 5 ohm output impedance. What this means that you are out of luck with any full size headphone. Sensitive IEMs and headphones should be OK.

I manage to run the jitter test as well:
View attachment 258440

Noise floor is high but otherwise, this is pristine output. Not something we see out of typical headphone dongle.

Multitone output was puzzling:
View attachment 258441

That sliding scale of sidebands in such a linear (really log) manner is not by accident. Some kind of processing going on, eliminating any dream you had of native high-resolution playback. FYI the same measurement using Roon player had a flat noise floor around -80 dB.

That's all I have for you.

Conclusions
The Sony Xperia 5 MK IV (and its more expensive sister, Xperia 1 MK IV) are the only flagship phones left with headphone output. The performance of said output is good from distortion point of view but not from power level. Or ability to play bit-exact content. Strange as you would think that Sony has the wherewithal to create a truly performant solution here.

While not related to audio, I find the super wide aspect ratio a poor choice that is only optimized for watching movies. And even there, you can get similar sized image out of a larger phone.

What a shame....

Needless to say, I can't recommend the Sony Xperia 5 MK IV.

----------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.

Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
So.. you didn't watch a single youtube review before buying? It would have shown you the size of the screen, and since it's important to you I feel it a bit lazy?
And also.. if you care about sound quality that much and don't use tws (NuraTrue Pro is REALLY good), I guess most people use a dongle like the Go Bar if they use IEM:s...
 

PeteL

Major Contributor
Joined
Jun 1, 2020
Messages
3,303
Likes
3,838
There is no universe where extended exposure to these levels as a kid is acceptable.
But what level? Since when an output voltage constitute a listening level? It is fully dependant on what you plug into that jack! And they cannot possibly know. This mesure don't make any sense at all you can get anybody's ear blow with 0.5 V, you just have to find a headphone sensitive enough for it. Give people responsibility, let the parents set a limit by software, easy to do. All kind of use cases can be had with an analog jack. What if you want to connect it to your amp? What is this 0.5V based on? How many eardrums realistically has it saved?
 

GXAlan

Major Contributor
Forum Donor
Joined
Jan 15, 2020
Messages
3,868
Likes
5,954
There is no universe where extended exposure to these levels as a kid is acceptable.
Same for adults!

My high frequency hearing is disproportionately good given my age and I attribute it to keeping my listening levels lower than typical. Have I listened at reference level? Of course. But nowadays when I go to the movie theaters, I often bring earplugs and it’s still very enjoyable.

OSHA standards are partially in place because employers can be sued and a safe work environment is needed. But the requirements are no different for recreational listening.
 
Top Bottom