Gadgetory

continuing our new series talking about smartphone audio we're circling back to one of the most popular phones released this year Samsung impressed us with the Galaxy s7 s focus on refining this phone line and replacing features we enjoyed like water resistance and microSD card expansion this phone is one of our favorite options to recommend is a high quality Android all-rounder but how does it handle audio like music and movie playback conducting our benchmarks plugging the galaxy s7 into our high quality audio interface recording speaker playback and listening to a variety of musical genres on several different pairs of headphones we've come to the conclusion that it's not that great to be sure it's not bad but in this price bracket audio reproduction on the Qualcomm powered galaxy s7 ranks about second to last against all of the flagship phones we've reviewed this year yet even ranks below this one starting with speaker playback it's loud enough nice for alerts and notifications but clarity is rather poor it's a somewhat dull output where instruments get jumbled up and obviously this tiny single speaker won't deliver much bass we just wish we could separate out individual sounds a little bit better as we can on a few other single speaker phones where LG has improved significantly this year with the V 20 and the oneplus 3 might not be quite as loud but delivers a more pleasant overall sound for those interested we have our speaker test samples linked in this reviews description if you'd like to take a listen for yourself now no one's really expecting a hi-fi speaker package built into a small phone but we should expect that an expensive smartphone should properly Drive nice headphones right sadly the galaxy s7 fails to inspire much joy here either this phone is capable of playing back 24-bit audio files but the final output falls fairly far behind competitors and this amp is one of the weaker ones we've tested near this price tag if you use headphones with slightly higher than consumer grade impedance the s7 will struggle to properly drive them it's not really fair putting this up against an HTC or an LG V it also loses to our fee okay one USB DAC which we use as a baseline so to interpret these results looking at a phone punches above its price tag the galaxy loses out in most tests to the one plus three both phones offer great frequency response numbers but the one plus four is a substantially lower noise floor a wider dynamic range less distortion and a lot less stereo crosstalk in lay terms this means the galaxy's headphone jack produces more noise when nothing is playing there's a much narrower gap between the loudest and softest sounds this Jack can produce and there's more bleed between the left ear and the right year definitely a bummer seeing a galaxy s7 struggle in any way to compete against a $400 phone literally the only flagship which the galaxy can beat is the LG g5 using the built-in headphone jack which we expect LG used as a cost savings anticipating people who cared about audio would go out and buy the add-on DAC friend now what we wanted to know was whether this performance from Samsung was an anomaly as the Galaxy line performed better in the past is this an issue reflecting the differences between Exynos and qualcomm chipsets looking to last year's Galaxy phones which even in the United States used Samsung not Qualcomm processors the S line of phone seems to have always been a mid tier performer but the Galaxy s6 is capable of outperforming this year's as7 looking at the note 5 and galaxy s6 edge+ Samsung phablets could easily hang with Apple hardware just nipping at the heels behind HTC just as we surmised with the iPhone 7 in our first real audio review this audio performance isn't bad per se it's completely functional but that's not particularly exciting or inspiring on a phone which still commands a premium price tag again like the iPhone 7 it's also disappointing to see that this year's flagship is a step down from last year's when so many other areas of this phone have been improved the final word if one of your primary uses for a phone is listening to music the galaxy s7 might not be the best fit for you as always thanks so much for watching be sure to subscribe to this channel for more reviews like these and help us out with some sharing on your favorite social networks for PocketNow i'm juan carlos Becnel some gadget guy on twitter and instagram and i will catch you all on the next review you