LG Dare Cell Phone Review - Audio Quality

Sound received was good, but sound sent had some serious problems. Side tone was just a bit low.

General Audio
The quality of audio you get from your cell phone is arguably the most important aspect of your cell phone's performance. To ensure we can give you the best information about audio quality we use professional equipment and software to test it. We use a Head and Torso Simulator (HATS) to simulate the human head and ear and we use Listen Inc's SoundCheck software to analyze the audio. This is the same combination of hardware and software used by many manufacturers and carriers. For more information on how we do our audio testing see this article

Sound Receive Frequency Response (7.73)
In this test we take a look at the quality of audio received by the LG Dare, so this is how others will sound to you during a call. Below you can see the Dare's performance in blue with the limits against which we test in red.

You can see that the LG Dare had a couple of issues, rising slightly above our limits in the mid range of frequencies and then dropping off a bit faster than we would like. Neither of these are major issues, however, and you should not notice any major problems with the audio quality received by the Dare. You can see below that the Dare put up a score right in the middle of our comparison phones, and in fact it's almost exactly average for all cell phones.

Cell Phone	LG Dare	Samsung Glyde (on CARRIER)	Samsung Instinct (on CARRIER)
Score	7.73	6.56	7.25
Received Sound Frequency Response Graph

Cell Phone	LG Voyager (on CARRIER)	Palm Centro (on CARRIER)	Apple iPhone (on CARRIER)
Score	7.84	6.24	9.17
Received Sound Frequency Response Graph

Sound Send Frequency Response (6.74)
Here we look at the quality of audio sent by the LG Dare, so this is how you will sound to those on the other end of the call. Once again the chart below indicates the Dare's performance in blue with the two red lines indicating the limits against which we test.

You can see that there are some significant issues with the audio sent by the LG Dare. At lower frequencies it falls below our limits and then rises above them at higher frequencies. This means that lower voices will sound extra bassy while higher pitched voices will be exaggerated. You can see below that the Dare's score on this test is the worst amongst our comparison phones.

Cell Phone	LG Dare	Samsung Glyde (on CARRIER)	Samsung Instinct (on CARRIER)
Score	6.74	8.23	6.75
Sound Sent Frequency Response Graph

Cell Phone	LG Voyager (on CARRIER)	Palm Centro (on CARRIER)	Apple iPhone (on CARRIER)
Score	8.51	7.82	7.58
Sound Sent Frequency Response Graph

Handset Side Tone (8.29)
Side tone is the small amount of your own voice that a phone pipes into your ear so you can judge how loudly you are speaking. Our ideal for side tone is -18 decibels while the Dare scored -19.71 decibels in our test. This is slightly lower than we would have liked, you may find yourself raising your voice just a bit to compensate, but is nowhere near as bad as the Samsung Glyde or Instinct, as you can see below.

Side Tone in Decibels

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