Gadgetory

hello again ladies and gentlemen I'm Joe handy from and Rhoda 30.com you know smart phones have replaced pretty much everything when it comes to listening to music these days and if you want to know which smart phones are the best ones for music well that's a question where I try to answer right now okay folks so we tested a grand total of seven smart phones and they are the BlackBerry privity galaxy note 5 the LG v10 the Motorola Droid turbo 2 the Nexus 6p the Xperia z5 premium and last but certainly not least the ZTE axon which we included thanks to its 24-bit high-five deck which made it a prime candidate for this test to give us an overview of how each smartphone performs we put each headphone jack through a focus right to i2 interface and then ran the popular write mark audio analyzer checking for frequency response noise and distortion characteristics will start with noise and crosstalk which should push well through the negative 96 decibel floor offered by the 16-bit audio if any of our high quality Doc's want to come close to realizing their touted 24 or 32-bit performance crosstalk isolation is excellent across all of the models but none of our smartphones made a notable move past negative 96 decibels the Xperia z5 premium plucks in at a decent negative 100 decibels while these été acts on falls way short at just negative 92 decibels it's by no means noisy but it seems to defeat the objective of offering a 24-bit DAC and LG's 32 bit DAC boasting is just outright ridiculous now to be fair to the smart phones when approaching negative 100 decibels we are starting to push up against the noise limits of our testing equipment so to avoid complicating the results we'll simply test with 16-bit audio from here on out next up is dynamic range which is the difference between the loudest and the quietest outputs we should see all of our smartphones hit the full 96 decibel dynamic range afforded by our 16-bit signal tests while some smartphones do three of our models fall short the Nexus 6p the Xperia z5 premium and the ZTE axon cannot reach the target meaning according to our resident audiophile rob Triggs the circuit noise is likely making its way to the signal path this isn't an unexpected result from a compact device with lots of potential for interference but the circuit layout and the leading phones appears to be better thought out the total harmonic distortion results are excellent across the board with all of the handsets putting in performance well below 0.004% which is really good by the way the ZTE axon is the winner by a small margin followed by the Prive and then the v10 the real test for music though is intermodulation distortion because this shows the amount of distortion generated when playing back multiple tones there is a far greater disparity in this test with the LG v10 Nexus 6p and the ZTE axon all taking the lead coming in at or below 0.01% the galaxy note 5 in the Xperia z5 premium are very close at about 0.01 2 percent while the Prive and the droid turbo 2 are the worst performers it should be noted that such small percentage differences are going to be very tough if not impossible to tell apart so pretty much all of these phones are right about Tide frequency response is as flat as you can get across all tested smartphones at least when connected up to our interface interestingly the Droid turbo - the Nexus 6p the BlackBerry Prive and the LG v10 seem to have a low-pass filter on their DAC output with a negative 3 decibel point at just over 18 kilohertz this is likely designed to remove any high-frequency interference from high-speed signals such as the codec clock without interfering with the audible spectrum or it could be something in the software it is a bit disappointing to see that none of the higher resolution devices offer a noticeable bit depth advantage but this just highlights the difficulties and fitting low noise audio circuits into a mobile phone if nothing else with that said the 32 bit LG v10 performs consistently well across all of the tests followed closely by the galaxy note 5 and the hi-fi ZTE axon of course no audio test would be complete without a good old fashioned listening test Robert Triggs who did most of the work on the research for this video performed the audio test as well he used a pair of AKG K 5 50s along with some flak encoded music files to summarize his findings he found that the LG v tend to be the best in the listening test with the note 5 in the Xperia z5 having favorable experiences the droid turbo 2 and the Nexus 6p were among the worst performers with the Prive and the axon falling somewhere in the middle if you want to check out all of Rob's findings for this test which I do encourage that you do you can find his entire experience in the written companion which is linked in the video description below the last test we performed was the rear speaker volume most people use this for game videos are music when headphones and Bluetooth speakers aren't readily available now it is important to remember the decibels are a logarithmic scale and for every 10 decibel increased results in roughly doubling of the perceived loudness of the sound this makes the LG v10 the loudest of the bunch by some margin offering up double the peak volume of the BlackBerry Prive the Xperia z5 premium and the ZTE axon at a whopping 100 decibels we honestly don't recommend sticking your ear right next to the speaker on that phone given the decent performance of the ZTE axon in the headphones test the speakers were kind of a major disappointment we didn't have any complaints about the other phones but the axon speaker was horrendously tinny when you take the whole picture into account the LG v10 is the clear winner it comes out as the best performer in both the jack and speaker tests and it just sounds really good second place in a very close run contest was the samsung galaxy note 5 with the xperia z5 premium and the Nexus 6p all putting in good performances the Galaxy Note 5 just edges out ahead in the benchmark and speaker tests which puts it in second place and the excellent sound on the z5 premium earned at a third place entry sadly the acts on phones disappointing dynamic range and speaker results hurt what was otherwise a lovely sounding phone but we have to assess phones on their full package and not just part of it unfortunately the Moto droid turbo 2 didn't stand out in the listening test and have the worst distortion results so it earned itself a spot on the bottom if you want to see all these charts again don't forget to check out the written version and the video description below and feel more than welcome to converse about our findings in the comments below once again i'm joe handy from android authority comm while you're here you might as well subscribe to the android authority youtube channel if you're hanging out for a minute we have a couple of awesome videos for you to watch right over there and they're also linked in the video description below for you folks on mobile finally don't forget to check out the written companion which is in the video description below and keep an eye out because we have a whole bunch more of these best of android videos as always thanks for watching everybody and have a wonderful day you