Nokia E66 Cell Phone Review - Audio Quality

The Nokia E66 did well in our audio tests for audio sent and received by the phone, however you may find yourself speaking a little too loudly on the phone as sidetone was too low.

General Audio
The quality of the audio during a phone call is probably the most important feature of any cell phone, which is why we use professional equipment and software to test it for you. To simulate the human ear we use a HATS (Head and Torso Simulator). To analyze the sound produced by the phone we use Listen Inc's SoundCheck software. This is the same combination of software and hardware that many manufacturers and carriers use to test their phones. For more information on how we do our audio testing see this article

Sound Receive Frequency Response (8.99)
The graph below shows you the performance of sound received by the Nokia E66. This is how others will sound to you during a call. The two red lines are the limits against which we test while the blue line is the phone's performance.

You can see that the E66 performed rather well in our test. Not only did it stay within our limits across frequencies but its curve also stayed near the center of the limits with a slight rise at the end before dropping off, which is what we like to see. In practice this means that the sound you receive on the E66 should be clear. You can see from the comparison table below that only the BlackBerry Pearl performed better in this test than the E66.

Cell Phone	Nokia E66	Palm Centro (on Sprint)	BlackBerry Pearl 8130 (on Verizon)
Score	8.99	6.24	9.28
Received Sound Frequency Response Graph

Cell Phone	Nokia N82 (on AT&T)	Samsung Blackjack II (on AT&T)	LG enV2 (on Verizon)
Score	7.60	8.42	7.63
Received Sound Frequency Response Graph

Sound Send Frequency Response (8.35)
In this test we look at the sound sent by the Nokia E66, so this is how you will sound to those on the other end of the call. The chart below once again shows the E66's performance with a blue line while the red lines are the limits against which we test.

You can see that the E66 stays within the limits except for the very end where it dips a little faster than we would like. This might mean that higher voices may occasionally be a littler hard to hear, but the deviation is not significant enough that it should cause major problems. Despite this slight problem the E66 did rather well in this test, you can see below that once again only the Pearl performed better.

Cell Phone	Nokia E66	Palm Centro (on Sprint)	BlackBerry Pearl 8130 (on Verizon)
Score	8.35	7.82	8.66
Sound Sent Frequency Response Graph

Cell Phone	Nokia N82 (on AT&T)	Samsung Blackjack II (on AT&T)	LG enV2 (on Verizon)
Score	6.50	7.02	7.47
Sound Sent Frequency Response Graph

Handset Side Tone (6.68)
Side tone is the small amount of your own voice that the handset pipes back into your ear so you can judge how loudly you're speaking. Side tone should be around -18 decibels, however the E66 came in significantly below that at -21.32 decibels.

What this means in practice is that you may judge your voice to be too low, causing you to speak louder than you should. You can see below that this may be a significant problem as the E66 performed worse in this test than any of our comparison phones except the LG enV2.

Sidetone in Decibels