Gadgetory

so you probably caught my video recently on the new razor phone the razor phone - which features two front-facing stereo speakers now if you've been following the channel for a little while you may remember some test that I did with the previous version of razor phone because at that point when that phone came out it had some speaker performance that for me was unprecedented in the smartphone space now one of the things I frequently test in my smartphone videos is speaker quality and speaker volume in the razor phone - video I kind of had the sense that the speaker was improved the speakers were improved from the previous version initial impressions here a lot of sound coming out of there but I hadn't tested them yet not extensively last time around with the razor phone one I came up with a scientific test using this right here a decibel meter check mate SPL meter and this will tell you how loud a signal is I used a signal generator a frequency generator in order to figure out how last year's flagship smartphones performed and stacked up against one another so I thought now would be a good time now that we have our hands on the latest razor phone which should be might be possibly is the new speaker champ we should do the tests again to see where these smartphones stack up so in front of me I have of course beat razor phone - I've also got the iPhone 10's max and then on the far side I have another impressive speaker performer at least it seemed that way in the unboxing video this is the pixel 3 XL it also has two forward-firing speakers now in the last test I found the iPhone the iPhone 10 to be very surprising as well from a performance perspective but then when I tested out the 10s max I saw an improvement at least my impressions were that it was also improved so he should see bigger numbers from all of them but the main question is which one is the biggest which is the loudest performing smartphone speaker of these three I will place each smartphone in this location here I'll then initiate the frequency generator and we will watch the meter to see how it reacts to the signal coming out of the smartphone now the reason for this exact setup is to replicate what it would be like to sit in front of these smartphones so if you're wondering it you'll maybe right now you're like look Lou on iphone not all the speakers are firing forward it's true they're not but your face is always going to be forward right like this is where you would be enjoying your content so this is the important measurement from this location right here and the iPhone does have some sound coming from the earpiece region and that is firing forward as well we'll start with the iPhone now another thing to note these are going to be running frequency from 20 Hertz to 20 kilohertz this is the human audio spectrum and I have all the different videos coming out of the YouTube app and playing back in the same quality because yes the quality settings on YouTube do also affect the audio quality there's a few different settings on this SPL meter you can pick between 40 70 60 90 and so on but if I recall last year I think most of them were in the 80 to 110 DB range so I'm gonna use that setting for this test so let's go ahead hit the play button and watch the meter okay so the test has been run you have seen the numbers and surprisingly all of these devices are closer than I expected them to be in the maximum SPL output now of the group the raiser is the only device with the built-in dolby effects so you can go in and select equalizers and also bass boost and and other aspects for the test we actually had it in dynamic mode with the bass enhancer turned on now something I noticed too you know to my own ears outside the realm of the meter is that with the bass enhance on specifically there was a bit of a sort of a garbling effect at maximum volumes so in a way I feel like maybe the Razr device needs a bit more tuning or maybe they're attempting to push it too far in terms of volume at the expense possibly of some quality now it's important to note that these devices were outputting volume at the lower frequency range it just wasn't enough to trigger the sensitivity of the SPL meter so what I notice with my own ears is that the lower frequencies the Razr device was the only one that was discernible especially at the ones that are barely audible to the human ear at the beginning of the frequency generator so I could pick up some volume coming out of it which leads me to believe that this device is probably outputting the most sound at the low end but the funny thing is that when I line them up here with some music like a regular user might and I hold them in front of my face the most pleasing is not necessarily the loudest and that's where we get into the land of my own judgement I actually like the razor phone the least it's a bit bizarre to me there's a bit of crunchiness there at certain aspects with certain instruments in a song almost like it's clipping granted this is a brand new device maybe some of this can be tuned via software but still a little bit upsetting considering that I was expecting this to just blow these other ones out of the water especially when you're sacrificing so much screen real estate for these giant speaker grilles I mean it might be a software thing it might be an optimization thing but for me these two are actually better these two are actually better sounding than the razor phone - that's weird that's not what I expected to say granted on overall total maximum output that the SPL meter could pick up yes the razor phone - was capable of outputting the most sound so I think it might have the potential but as it stands right now in front of me it's the least pleasing audio that I'm hearing yes it's forward-facing yes it's stacked up against some pretty good performers here they're all way better than some other options on the market and it seems that smartphone makers are taking speaker performance into serious consideration when it comes to these other two on the right hand side it's a bit of a toss-up everybody in the studio here was listening and was like I don't know man and I kind of liked the pixel I kind of liked the iPhone I would probably give it to the pixel just because both speakers are forward firing as opposed to the iPhone but then the iPhone because it does have the down firing speaker on a table it kind of resonates more it almost amplifies off the table to make it seem like it has more low-end than it might so if you're the type of person that likes to just leave a phone on the table have a little have a couple drinks have a party or something that might actually be the better choice so is it really tough to say they're all crazy speakers amazing speakers for smart phones I had really high expectations for the Razr speakers and I don't really think they're there yet good on both Google and Apple for taking speaker performance seriously and delivering these type of products as they both sound pretty amazing they might be the sounding smartphones that are out there right now I think the razor has a chance I don't know what they can do via software but I hope they do something cuz right now they're really missing out and I don't think it's strictly a hardware thing we'll see what happens right now it's not the most pleasing sound coming out of there even though it happens to be loud