Gadgetory

pocket now's I phone seven coverage is brought to you by D brand to buy the best fitting skin for your phone or tablet please visit D brand calm hello pocket now fans and welcome to the first real audio review of a smart phone we already produce some of the most in-depth camera reviews under the real camera review title we wanted to try and see if we could bring that same level of discussion to the audio our smartphones and tablets produce and to start off this series we're going to take a look at a fairly controversial phone in terms of audio the iPhone 7 to recap the audio Hardware onboard Apple has added stereo speakers to the iPhone 7 but of course has gotten rid of the 3.5 millimeter headphone jack requiring users to go through the lightning connector for any kind of connected audio accessory and as a quick aside there is no such thing as a purely digital audio listening experience not until we can plug a USB cable directly into our brains at some point you do need to create vibrations in air that your ears can interpret as sound and that's still an analog output digital audio output on the iPhone 7 is basically just a file transfer to this plug which is then responsible for converting those zeros and ones into actual acoustic pressure now a quick note about our testing procedure a lot of it's based on just listening to music listening to a lot of music we also try to switch up that testing by listening on a variety of different headphones my personal favorites are the sennheiser hd25 s these are closed back studio monitors you see them a lot in broadcast situations and those are joined by a pair of noble in-ear monitors that i also like to use for recording situations and to cover more of a consumer sound i'm a big fan of the crossfade m1 hundreds from v-moda lastly if the phone manufacturer includes a pair of headphones in the box we also take a listen to those two just to get a sense of what the phone manufacturer is supplying consumers for their listening audio ecosystem for actually measuring audio quality one of the first things we'll do is literally shove a pair of microphones into my HD 25s just to hear how loud the output can get these are a pretty good test for the amp output they're slightly higher impedance rating than most consumer grade headphones 75 ohms where most consumer headphones are somewhere around 30 and if enough of you actually care to know what that means we might produce another video on that topic sometime in the future and lastly we perform a line test where we connect the headphone djaq directly to the inputs on my audio interface connected to my workstation that last has can get a little tricky because some phones like the v10 are sophisticated enough to change their output depending on what you've connected to this headphone jack but for now that line test is still been the fairest way we've been able to determine the actual quality coming out of these smart phones so how did the iPhone 7 do in our listening and recording tests not that actually it's pretty good the output from this adapter is actually better than average and so you shouldn't have to max out the phone's volume to drive a decent pair of headphones and in synthetic testing we see a fairly flat frequency response which means this phone isn't overly juicing certain frequencies of sound it's not maximizing the base or crystallizing the highs to any significant degree all audio devices make their own noise even when they're not playing a sound file and the noise floor on the iPhone 7 is better than average as is the dynamic range the measurement between the smallest lowest volume and the loudest possible volume is again better than mid-pack it's a fairly wide soundscape for a phone and those quieter sounds are not going to be competing with the natural noise floor of the phone when you're listening to your music iPhone 7 benefits from low distortion numbers and there's very little stereo crosstalk that means if you were to listen to an audio file that was playing sound in the right ear and silence in the left all devices naturally have some a little bit of bleed where that signal might carry over into the other channel the numbers on the iPhone are so low it would be nearly imperceptible the leakage from one track to the next now for quality Apple was the gold standard when the highest possible audio quality we could attain was CD quality 16-bit sound but Apple just sort of stayed there and the rest of the industry moved on now the iPhone is capable of playing 24 and 32-bit audio files but the actual output will be truncated to 16-bit sound you will not get the full benefit or the full dynamic range or the full frequency response of higher quality audio files 24-bit lossless audio notwithstanding if all of these numbers are pretty good why are we concerned about this adapter situation I mean first of all this thing's going to be really easy to lose and we're also not super confident in the long term durability of Apple cabling on something that's going to have a lot of stress applied to it but when it comes to listening to your music the iPhone 7 is a small but scientifically measurable step down from the built-in headphone jack on the iPhone 6s in the iPhone se the 6s is going to feature a wider dynamic range a lower noise floor and even a slightly louder amp than what we'll find with the 7 adapter but through the adapter or through the earpods audio output on the iPhone 7 is a small step down when compared against other manufacturers the iPhone 7 headphone adapter really has no issues besting the Galaxy s7 or the LG g5 without of course the B&O DAC but this thing loses pretty readily to phones like the HTC 10 or the LG v10 it also faces a tough fight against phones like the axon 7 where ZTE will overdrive most headphones has a lower noise floor but the axon has a narrower dynamic range now a quick word about the Apple earpods these are some of my least favorite included headphones from any smartphone manufacturer the drivers are actually pretty decent if maybe a bit dull in the upper mids in my opinion but they create such a poor seal around the ear that when I'm using them I know I'm having to crank the volume on my phone louder to overcome environmental noise around me which means over a longer period of time I know I'm going to be doing more damage to my hearing than a proper in the ear earbud solution now more subjectively listening to a variety of genres of music the output from the iPhone 7 is pretty good though I find even with this really flat frequency response where the phone really isn't juicing any particular frequencies of sound just I phones in general have slightly more of a tendency to crystallize or create brittle or sharp high-frequency sounds when I'm listening through different pairs of headphones those highs can range from being sparkling to somewhat harsh or unpleasant to listen to especially when you're listening at louder volumes overall though this is a respectable solution and better than average for a modern-day smartphone now moving over to the speakers we're excited to hear stereo sound on an iPhone although I wouldn't say that each individual speaker is necessarily a higher quality than the single speaker on the iPhone 6s but of course having - really increases that landscape of audio really great playing videos or playing video games and having two speakers is just louder so it's a nice benefit for ringtones and alerts Apple's first attempt at a stereo phone competes very well against Alcatel 's and axons though we still do prefer the speaker layout on the HTC 10 for really filling in that full dynamic rich sound for audio and the iPhone 7 can sound a little stuffy in the mids especially against the HTC 10 but overall this is a great first attempt at improving the speaker quality on the iPhone we have a separate video linked in the description below this one where you can hear some of the actual speaker tests we perform we stopped including those samples in our full phone reviews because too many crybabies were getting their undies and twists over hearing the same sound samples in each of our videos we're not including that content to entertain consistency is really important when trying to grade which smartphone produces better sound if I play a jazz sample in one video and a hip hop sample in another what are we really doing there now I've been rambling long enough let's wrap this up where's that leave us with the audio quality on the iPhone 7 when just looking at the numbers this is a solid upper mid pack solution for listening to music tackling your phone calls and getting your ringtones and alerts but when viewed in the larger context of other Apple devices and competing manufacturers were not exactly excited about better than average performance from a top-tier premium priced product pocket now is iPhone coverage is brought to you by D brand check out D brand calm to customize your iPhone with a real-time preview D brand skins are designed to add grip texture and kill those jet-black iPhone fingerprints they ship worldwide and iPhone skins start at under 10 bucks if you're interested links are in the description below and we want to hear from you what are you looking to do to shake up your headphone listening are you looking at bluetooth are you looking at different adapters we can be pretty sure that a number of companies are going to start moving to headphone lists smart phone designs as always thanks so much for watching be sure to subscribe to this channel for our full iPhone 7 coverage and hopefully expanding on this series doing more real audio reviews to complement our real camera reviews for pocket now I'm Juan Carlos bag now some gadget guy on Twitter and Instagram and I we'll catch you all on the next review you