Motorola RAZR V3m Cell Phone Review - Audio Quality
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Alfredo Padilla Published on March 16, 2007 Comment on this |
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The Razr V3m may be a small, thin phone, but that won’t be of much use if it doesn’t sound good. Fortunately, the Razr V3m had pretty good sound quality on both incoming and outgoing sound. We test this using professional grade hardware and software: a Head and Torso Simulator (H.A.T.S) from Brüel & Kjær, and a professional audio analysis package called SoundCheck (from Listen, inc). Both of these products are used by many industry professionals the world over to test audio 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 (8.12)
Motorola Razr V3m on Verizon: Receive Frequency Response
The thin profile of the Razr V3m might have been a problem: the flip cover where the loudspeaker is located is just .26 inches thick, and that doesn’t leave a lot of room for the speaker to vibrate in. But the engineers at Motorola seem to have solved this: The Razr v3m had good performance in our test on received sound (the sound that the cell phone itself produces, such as the voice of a caller). We test against the limits set by the ITU for how phones should perform (indicated by the red lines on the graph; the blue is the curve of the phone). The only major issue is that it is a bit high at the bass end of the curve (on the left), which could lead to voices sounding more like baritones than tenors. But this peak is not too, high, indicating that these frequencies are not overly exaggerated. The frequency response of the V3m was better than many other phones; it earned a higher score than the T-mobile Dash and the Treo 700p.
Sound Send Frequency Response (7.88)
Motorola Razr V3m on Verizon: Receive Frequency Response
The microphone of the V3m is located in the bottom of the phone, just below the keypad. And it does a good job of picking up sound: we found that the frequency response of the sent sound (such as you talking into the handset) was good; the curve was smooth and didn’t have any unexpected bumps or troughs. The curve was a little high at the lower end of the frequency spectrum, though, which would make voices sound a little deeper than they actually are.
Handset Side Tone (9.25)
Motorola Razr V3m on Verizon: Side Tone
If you’ve ever had an ear infection or other problem, you know how your voice gets louder when you can’t hear your own voice properly. This happens with cell phones as well; they block your voice by covering your ear. They deal with this by passing part of the voice that they capture back to you through the speaker; a technique called side tone. But this has to be a specific amount to work properly; about 18 decibels to be precise. Fortunately, the Razr V3m was pretty much spot on with this; we measured the side tone at 17.69 decibels.
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