Gadgetory

all right when we first started talking about the concept of producing these real audio reviews there was one phone I was most thinking about running through these tests we finally have our hands on an LG V 20 which is not a pre-release unit and I'm glad we waited there have been a few little software tweaks which have improved this phone there's already been an update for this where the pre-release units haven't received any software support yet now we can get into the more detailed analysis which we really shouldn't have been doing on an engineering example as we've explained in previous videos there's only a single speaker on the bottom of the phone and on the opposite side of the USBC port there's the headphone jack powered by a quad DAC and a pretty killer amp let's knock out speaker performance right quick I don't think anyone's going to be blown away by a single bottom firing speaker but we can hear this is a nice upgrade over last year's LG v10 this had actually a pretty dull and uninspiring speaker for such a monster phone in every other respect this is easily going to lose to any kind of stereo solution but this does get the v20 up to that tier we would expect of a high quality single speaker though we'd absolutely like to see LG move to eight front facing speaker solution just replace that top earpiece a la Motorola I think that'd be pretty keen for those of you who are interested we do have some of our speaker sample tests linked in a separate video you can find that in the description below this review but what we want to get to is the headphone jack performance the quad DAC performance on the lg v20 so has this phone performed when you plug in some headphones in two words very good in more than two words it's a little complicated quantifying how this thing actually does perform if you caught RB 20 versus V 10 comparison video we did show up how sophisticated these headphone jacks are tailoring the output to what device is connected to them moving to this quad AK we see a bit more inconsistency in the output of this phone as compared to the v10 before it the general fear of LG might be getting a little too clever for its own good but let's actually chat some numbers this thing has few issues stomping on most mobile audio solutions it had absolutely no problems translating my V okay Dack better frequency response better signal-to-noise ratio and a louder amp in terms of output volume these two perform very similarly once you start climbing up to higher impedance headphones the v20 just keeps getting more powerful and that's really the situation for all of the phones that we would compare against the b20 also we might find an individual victory for example the iPhone 7 has less stereo crosstalk that's the bleed between your left channel and your right channel but then the v20 pretty much wins everything else so what about a phone like the axon 7 the axon 7 was responsible for us changing how we produced our audio reviews it was so loud what's been preventing us from seeing the true final output of the V 20 is its sophisticated headphone jack connecting it to the line input on my audio interface the phone would detect that it was connected to a line input while if it's connected to a line input I don't need to send the hottest possible signal so it would actually reduce output volume going through a bunch of janky little adapters and connectors I found a way to trick the phone into thinking it was still connected to high impedance cans and what do we see we see a phone that is just a decibel behind the axon 7 going through a splitter so when we see that waveform which is nearly overloading my audio interface I'm assuming we could probably add on another 2 decibels at least just because it's going through this piece of crap Y adapter splitter here we do have a few concerns though the V 20 has proven to be one of the most difficult phones for us to get any kind of consistent baseline on what this thing can produce especially using our synthetic benchmarks what was most troubling with the V 20 was a series of playthroughs where the phone seemed to be truncating to 16-bit audio and also opposite the v10 we see just a little bit more manipulation of the signal through most of the files that we're playing that's not to say that there's more noise or your audio files are being degraded but this quad DAC system in making all of these tiny little adjustments seems to be sprinkling in just a little bit more juice to make your audio file sound better I can totally envision some scenarios where purists might not appreciate that what's a long and rambling way to describe what we were seeing during our synthetic benchmarks getting away from the number generating machines popping in some headphones and just taking a listen to what the v20 can produce this is my favorite performer of the year it's bold and it's loud on a decent pair of headphones I really can't listen past halfway before it starts getting really uncomfortable and this phone does a beautiful job of reproducing every single musical genre that I've thrown at it from live recordings of classical and orchestrated music all the way up to really limited and loud electronica and hip-hop and rock the highs will Sparkle without becoming piercing the bass will definitely rumble your skull and there's enough power in this system to make sure that the mids are well represented for all of those really crunchy distortion effects on guitars what you're paying for in this phone is a device sophisticated enough to tailor its output to whatever headphones you connect to it this phone is going to try and make sure that it's sending you the best possible audio signal regardless of how expensive or inexpensive your headphones are all out of a lowly old fashioned 3.5 millimeter jack I still happen to think that's pretty impressive for a phone it's just that this year it's a little bit twitchy er than what we had last year as always folks thanks so much for watching be sure to subscribe to this channel for more reviews like these I will definitely be doing more real audio reviews on phones as they come out we're going to circle back to a few more devices that were released earlier in the year and definitely be on the lookout for the real camera review coming soon now that we have finished consumer retail hardware for the b-24 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 alright when we first started hahaha my voice is not warmed up at all