Motorola W385 Cell Phone Review - Audio Quality
The amount of money you spend on a phone shouldn't affect its ability to make calls. As such, we're holding the W385 to the same industry standards with which we test all our phones. To do this we use both the hardware and software used by phone manufacturers, scoring phones against standards set by the industry. Our hardware, a head and torso simulator (HATS), is basically the top half of a mannequin, except with far more sophisticated technology in its ears and mouth. Our software is Listen Inc's
SoundCheck software, which we use to analyze the phone's performance at various frequencies, which represent the range of the human voice. If you'd like to know more, read
this article.
Sound Receive Frequency Response (8.03)
The W385 handles incoming frequencies well. As you can see in the below graph, the W385's performance (blue line) remains within the limits up until the very end, where it clips them a little. What this means is that higher-frequency sounds, such as sibilance, might sound slightly muted. The rest of the spectrum is uniformly pushed towards the top limit, which means incoming sounds will sound slightly louder, but not by any margin you'd notice. Overall, however, an incoming caller should sound fine.
Sound Send Frequency Response (8.29)
Though the W385 handles your own voice slightly better than the voice of an incoming caller, it has all the same quirks. The graph is toward the higher end of the limits the entire time, which means your voice will sound slightly louder on the receiving end. Also the graph bumps into the limit towards the end. Again, however, these quirks shouldn't be noticeable.
Handset Side Tone (8.87)
Side tone was also pretty dead on performance-wise. Side tone refers to how loudly the phone plays back your own voice; it's for you to judge how loudly you sound on the other end. The ideal side tone is -18 decibels, and the W385 measured -16.87, which is pretty close to ideal. It is slightly louder, so you might speak a little softer than you normally would. Like the rest of the W385's audio quirks, however, this issue isn't something you'd notice.
For readability's sake, the numbers in the below chart have al been made positive.
