Helio Ocean Review - Audio Quality
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Richard Baguley Published on May 16, 2007 Comment on this |
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Helio’s slogan for their phones is “don’t call it a phone”. But whatever they want you to call it, you still use it for making phone calls. And the quality of the sound on these phone calls is important; if the quality of the received sound is poor, you won’t be able to understand what the other person says. And if the quality of the sound the Ocean transmits is bad, then the person you’re calling won’t be able to understand you. That’s why we use professional testing equipment to judge the sound quality of phones like the Ocean; our HATS (Head and Torso Simulator) behave just like the human head and ear, so we can get a measure of how the phone sounds in use. We use this in combination with a high-end electroacoustic testing program called SoundCheck that analyzes the sound the HATS captures and produces the graphs that you see below. Other review sites make a couple of phone calls and ask how it sounds; we analyze the frequency response of the phone in a scientific way. For further information on how our testing is conducted, see this article.
Sound Receive Frequency Response (7.88)
The Helio Ocean did well in this test, which measures the frequency response of the sound that is received (such as someone talking to you over the phone). The frequency response of the phone (shown by the blue line) fell mostly within the limits that the standard we measure against defines (shown by the red lines), only brushing up against the limits at two points. The curve was also pretty smooth, without any major peaks or troughs that would indicate that a particular frequency was being exaggerated or suppressed. There was a small trough near the top end of the frequency band (at the right of the graph between the two lines), but this wasn’t particularly significant; the frequency response of the Ocean for sound received was pretty good Sound Send Frequency Response (6.45)
The sound that the Ocean sent (such as you talking into it) wasn’t quite as good, though; although the frequency response curve (shown by the blue line was pretty flat (indicating that no frequencies were overly suppressed or exaggerated), it did go outside of the limits set in the standard we use, particularly at the lower end of the frequency range. This could lead to your voice sounding a little bassier and boomier than you might like; the standard calls for the frequency response at lower frequencies to be slightly lower than the higher ones. But this isn’t likely to be a huge problem; the response only goes outside the limits by a few decibels. The response also drops off a little quicker than we like to see, which could make your voice sound a little clipped.
Handset Side Tone (5.5)
Side tone is how cell phones let you hear your own voice; they inject a small amount of your captured voice back into the speaker so you can judge how loud your voice is. The Ocean passed back a bit less than we like to see; the standard calls for about -18 decibels, but we measured the average side tone to be around -22 decibels. This might lead to you talking a little bit louder than you need to. | Previous Next | |||||||||||||||||||
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