Gadgetory

it's a big phone with a big battery posting some big performance numbers but how does the mate 9 handle your audio we've taken a look at this beast or a listen rather and it's time to share our results the huawei mate nine includes a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack and new for this year stereo speakers which are orientation aware when holding the phone in portrait we get an HTC 10 style distribution where the earpiece tackles higher frequency sound and the bottom firing speaker performs more like a subwoofer filling in mids and lows rotating the phone to landscape switches this to a more traditional stereo left and right channel distribution in practice this works well enough except for the slight dropouts when the phone flips orientation and this is tied to the phone settings if you disable rotation in your settings the speakers stay pegged in portrait mode listening to the speaker quality regardless of orientation the bottom speaker is responsible for most of the heavy lifting overdriving the earpiece eyes tend to be a bit shrill at max volume at more comfortable levels especially arm's length from your face the two work together well enough to create a sense of depth in your music games and videos personally I was pleasantly surprised not because the mate has any hopes of unseating an HTC or the axon 7 but because this was a noticeable improvement over previous wall ways we've reviewed the Nexus 6p excepted of course and we're always happy to see progress now the headphone report isn't quite so glowing in fact we have a new winner here for last place including a dedicated 3.5 millimeter jack is still appreciated until we can all decide on a proper standard moving forward but the mate 9 posts some of the lowest performance numbers we've seen in any of our audio reviews falling behind even the LG g5 with a higher noise floor and lower dynamic range we're disappointed to also see truncated quality the phone will play 24-bit audio files but output seems to be limited to 16 bit worst of all the big mate 9 packs a small headphone amp on consumer headphones or the ear pod style buds which come with the phone it's a fine experience but the mate struggles to drive higher impedance cans even my lowly hd25 s only at 70 ohms cranking the phone to the max the output was at the upper limits of my tolerance but still comfortable to listen to and to my ears music was still somewhat on the dull side the huawei lost handily to our fee okay one dak a small USB audio device but happily the mate nine properly recognized the Pheo so for those who want to improve their headphone quality we have high hopes that future USB solutions will play nice with this phone the mate 9 gets a lot right in delivering one of the few truly large screen experiences of 2016 and we're happy to see some progress on speaker playback but this phone certainly won't be on the audiophile list at least not without a little help as always thanks so much for watching be sure to subscribe to this channel for our full mate 9 coverage be on the lookout for our real camera review so we can see some of the things this phone definitely gets right and help us out with some sharing on your favorite social networks for pocket now I'm Juan Carlos bag now some gadget guy on Twitter and Instagram and I will catch you all on the next review