Apple iPhone 3G S Cell Phone Review - Audio Quality

The audio quality of phone calls on the iPhone 3G S is very good; both incoming and outgoing voices sounded clear and accurate.

General Audio
However many fancy features a phone has, the fundamental job of the phone is the same; to allow you to make and receive phone calls. That's why we do extensive testing of the audio quality of a cell phone using a high end electroacoustic testing system with a Head and Torso simulator and an electoracoustic analysis software package called SoundCheck from the Boston-based company Listen, inc. This allows us to analyze the sound quality of the phone in depth; while other reviewers just make a few calls to their friends and ask how they sound, we look at the frequency response and sidetone of a phone in a scientific fashion. For more information on how we do our audio testing see this article.

Sound Receive Frequency Response (8.71)
In this test, we look at the quality of the sound that the phone receives, such as someone talking to you over the phone. We test the freequency response of the phone, measuring this against the limits set by a group of international experts on what a phone should sound like (the red lines in the graph below). We found that, like the previous generations of iPhones, the iPhone 3G S did well here; the frequency response was well within the expected limits, and actually seems to be slightly improved from the older models. However, the differences are subtle, but the bottom line is that voice coming over the phone will sound faithful to the origional.

Cell Phone	iPhone 3G S on AT&T	iPhone 3G (on AT&T)	iPhone (on AT&T)
Score	8.71	8.13	7.58
Received Sound Frequency Response Graph

Cell Phone	Nokia 5800 (on AT&T)	Samsung Memoir (on T-Mobile)	AT&T Fuze (on AT&T)
Score	8.08	6.73	7.22
Received Sound Frequency Response Graph

Sound Send Frequency Response (8.03)
How your voice sounds to the people at the other end of the line is another critical factor for a cell phone, ans we found that the iPhone 3G S did a very decent job here as well: the frequency response of the phone for sent sound is right on the button. Our only minor complaint is that the high frequency end of the graph falls off a little quickly, so your voice might sound slightly clipped. But this is a very minor complaint; generally, your voice should sound clear and accurate to the person on the other end.

Cell Phone	REVIEW PHONE	iPhone 3G (on AT&T)	iPhone (on AT&T)
Score	8.03	8.34	7.57
Sound Sent Frequency Response Graph

Cell Phone	Nokia 5800 (on AT&T)	Samsung Memoir (on T-Mobile)	AT&T Fuze (on AT&T)
Score	8.45	8.42	9.01
Sound Sent Frequency Response Graph

Handset Side Tone (8.04)
Cell phones have a problem; they block your ear. This means that you can't hear your own voice when taking into them, so you tend to shout. To help preserve the sanity of those around you, modern cell phones like the iPhone 3G S feed a small amount of the captured sound (your voice) back into their speakers so you can hear yourself. The ideal level for this is about -18dB, and the iPhone 3G S is jsut a touch off at about -19.96 dB. That means that your voice will be very slightly quieter than the ideal, but that shouldn't be enough to make you shout any more than you need to.

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