Gadgetory

do people still care about the audio playback on their smartphone of course they do what a foolish question I'm Juan Carlos van nelle for pocket now and we're going to take a quick look at smartphone audio quality just as a quick introduction I've worked in audio for well over a decade I got my start working for a voiceover talent agency and then moved over into voiceover casting and throughout that entire time I was also regularly found on film sets working on documentaries as a sound supervisor or as a location sound mixer audio has been really good to me and this is why it's such an important topic for me to discuss when we start looking at the newest advancements in smartphone technology recently if you caught our coverage of MWC 2016 you probably saw quite a few videos on phones like the galaxy s7 and the LG g5 specifically the g5 bringing a number of really interesting accessories to the table we've got that really nifty grip to help turn your phone into more of a point-and-shoot style camera but the one that was most interesting to us audio geeks is the new DAC that clip-on piece on the bottom of the phone which is supposed to radically improve headphone audio quality and of course we've got top-tier audio manufacturer branding through Bang & Olufsen but what does that actually mean what does this thing do and what benefit will that actually serve consumers and for the purposes of this video we are going to focus on headphone audio playback when you say things like the one m9 has terrific speaker playback you pretty much always need to add the suffix for a phone now LG is far from the first company to champion higher quality audio playback Apple still has a tremendous reputation for headphone playback built largely on that legacy of iPod devices HTC as we mentioned before has these boom sound front-facing speakers but that boom sound branding also talks about the amp which is built into the headphone jack on phones like the m8 and m9 even Samsung starting around phones like the galaxy s5 each successive generation of galaxy device has taken steps to improve upon the headphone playback over its predecessor but until recently LG was something of an audio outlier and not really in a good way last year's phones like the G flex 2 and the g4 both suffered from hissy or tinny somewhat brittle audio reproduction from headphone jacks this was likely a cost savings measures we get phones like the LG g4 which could handily undercut pricing on phones like the galaxy SX but that all changed when LG introduced the v10 we got major talking points not only about content creation but also content consumption and one of the shining crown jewels of this phone is its high quality DAC what the heck is a dak dak stands for digital to analog converter chances are probably pretty good that if you're watching this video now on the youtubes that most of your music collection is not on vinyl or on reel-to-reel or some kind of audio tape but exists as a series of zeros and ones in digital files on some type of hard drive or flash drive but at some point we have to take those zeros and ones and convert them into waves of energy which can travel through the air and interact with the two manic membrane in our ear which we call sound now between zeros and ones and acoustic force we have an intermediary step where that digital information is converted into an electrical signal and that tiny little electrical signal is what's responsible for wiggling the magnets in our headphones and speakers the digital to analog converter in any device is what's responsible for babysitting that transition now the v10 actually has two different digital to analog converters one of them is the DAC that's just built into Snapdragon chipset so when that Qualcomm provides for all phone manufacturers and that's what's going to handle most of the heavy lifting on your phone when you're taking phone calls you're utilizing the built-in phone speaker you're not really using the high quality DAC the secondary DAC only kicks in in specific audio situations and only when headphones are connected to the phone which makes sense because you don't really need super high quality audio playback all the time and having a separate piece of hardware dedicated to converting a higher quality audio signal will result in slightly higher battery draw as a lazy analogy the DAC that's built into the Snapdragon processor is probably gonna be fine but that's a lot like the onboard sound that you'll find on the motherboard of a laptop or a desktop if you need different or better audio capabilities then you need to invest in a different piece of stand-alone gear and that's what the ESS DAC built into the v10 and included in the accessory clip for the g5 is going to bring to the table it's not going to have all this stuff it's just going to have higher quality back there's a little confusion on the v10 because when you plug in headphones you'll see a high quality DAC icon at the top of your notification tray but if you're running a stock phone it's only going to kick on when you're using the LG supplied music player app or if you're utilizing some kind of third-party tweak from a site like xda-developers now the DAC is responsible for managing that transition from digital file to audio signal but along the way we have to boost the electrical output of that signal and that's where an amp comes into play short for amplifier as in we're going to take a tiny little electrical signal and amplify it so it can properly drive audio reproduction hardware like headphones and speakers and it's those two pieces which are responsible for higher quality or lower quality audio output not only does the v10 have a really high quality DAC when listening to music it also has a very high quality amp to make sure that it's properly driving the headphones that we plug in by comparison and someone please correct me in the comments if I've got this wrong but I don't believe HTC uses any really special or separate DAC in their phones but they do utilize extremely high quality amps to make sure that that headphone playback is loud and punchy and vibrant so why is this important I mean you're probably only going to be listening to music on your phone while you're sound tracking some other activity like you're focusing on your workout you want some sort of movie soundtrack background sound to motivate you through a run and you're probably only listening on really low quality audio files right like the mp3s you ripped from your Napster's on your Pentiums back in the day man I'm old drizzly for a lot of people out there maybe it's not that important if you're just using the nearly disposable earbuds which came with the phone or if you're using some kind of bluetooth solution then you're already crafting a music listening experience which circumvents most of the hardware built into these devices and that's what's kind of interesting about LG strategy here on the g5 versus the v10 the v10 has this Hardware built-in you can't unbaked that pi you're going to pay for that higher quality audio kit whether you use it or not but the g5 is giving us an opportunity to handle a majority of smartphone users out there well I'm sure the headphone jack and the g5 is going to be fine but for those of us who want to take that experience to another level we now have an audio accessory which builds into the body of the phone in a much more seamless fashion and some of the other standalone DAX that we've seen in the past that connect through some kind of USB port then have a lump which sort of dangles off the phone and then you have to manage that not unplug it and then plug your headphones into a separate piece of hardware but it's absolutely delicious once all of this comes together the headphones that you really enjoy wearing paired with the device with a nice amp and a good high quality digital to analog converter everything opens up and we get more nuance the highs of your audio will Sparkle and shimmer as opposed to sounding piercing or tinny or brittle the mid-range is going to have far more clarity you'll be able to pick out instruments in space you won't lose distortion on guitars and speech will become far more clear and the base is going to Rumble but you're not going to lose out on the clarity of an instrument like an upright bass or a cello and it's not going to overshadow the mids and the highs and that's why we Audio geeks have been so interested in what LG is trying to bring to the table this year not only have we seen rapid improvement in audio quality from the g4 to the g5 but this also introduces the idea of building more modular pieces into our phone Android in its current state does a pretty terrible job in general of managing USB audio connections even though the g5 requires you to reboot the phone when you pull out the battery and you use those accessory clips it should bring greater stability when actually using the device to playback audio hopefully there will be fewer instances of that hardware locking up or flaking out because LG is designing specifically the interfaces by which those components will talk to the phone and to Android and of course we're just barely scratching the surface on the wonderful world of audio as it pertains to mobile devices and not the least of which is just getting better support for recording and hopefully we'll be seeing more traction on that in the years to come while this video has taken a very general track on explaining terms like DAC and amp I hope we'll be able to expand on that conversation in the comments below get a little more technical get a little more nitty gritty and hopefully get into some really fun audiophile debates as always folks thanks so much for watching be sure to subscribe to this channel for more really interesting content like this for pocket now I'm audio snob Juan Carlos now you can chat me up on Twitter and Instagram has some gadget guy and I will catch you all on the next video