LG Chocolate VX8500 Cell Phone Review - Audio Quality
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Alfredo Padilla Published on March 16, 2007 Comment on this |
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LG’s popular Chocolate phone is a small, svelte, phone, but how does it sound? We do extensive testing on the sound quality of the cell phones we review; after all, making phone calls is what they are designed to do. We do this using a combination of software and hardware: the software is a professional audio analysis package called SoundCheck (from Listen, inc) and the hardware is a Head and Torso Simulator (H.A.T.S) from Brüel & Kjær. Both of these products are used by many of the cell phone manufacturers themselves to test their products. For more on how we test, see here. We test the phones in use as a handset (held to the ear), and we’ll be adding more tests soon to examine the performance of the speakerphone and the headset.
Sound Receive Frequency Response (8.04)
LG Chocolate on Verizon: Receive Frequency Response
This test examines how well the cell phone receives and reproduces different frequencies, which shows how accurately it can reproduce the voices of people calling you. The graph shows the frequency response of the phone (in blue) and the upper and lower limits for frequency response defined by the ITU, an international telephone standards body. The frequency response of a good phone will fall within these limits, and a great phone will have a frequency response curve that cuts between the two limits like a racecar going around a corner: smooth and without touching the sides. And the LG Chocolate is a pretty good phone: it doesn’t quite cruise between the limits, but it doesn’t crash headlong into them, either. It does bump up against them at a couple of points, but the overall result is a smooth curve that indicates a phone that reproduces voices well.
Sound Send Frequency Response (7.88)
LG Chocolate on Verizon: Send Frequency Response
The other side of the cell phone equation is sending voices, and this test examines how well the cell phone handles this. Again, the Chocolate has strong performance here, with a frequency response curve that doesn’t show any major problems. It does get a little high at higher frequencies, though; the peak at around 3.4Khz is at the high end of the frequency range for human voices, but it does mean that voices may sound slightly tinny.
Handset Side Tone (9.25)
LG Chocolate on Verizon: Side Tone
Side tone is the technique that cell phones use to stop you yelling into them: they feed a small part of the sound they capture back to you through the speaker, so you can hear your own voice and judge how loud you are talking. The ITU standard calls for this to be around 18 decibels, and the LG is spot on; we measured the side tone at 18.75 decibels. This means that you shouldn’t need to shout or whisper into the phone; you’ll hear your own voice back at the right level to judge the volume correctly.
Headset (0.00)
No headset is included with the LG Chocolate, so the phone gets no score in this area. It doesn't have a standard 2.5-mm headset socket either, although an adapter that converts the proprietary data socket to a 2.5-mm socket is included. This is far from an ideal solution, though; if you loose the adapter, you can't use a headset, and attaching it ruins the clean look of the phone.
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