Nokia E71 Cell Phone Review - Audio Quality

The E71's audio quality wasn't overly impressive, but wasn't terrible either. The biggest issue was side tone that was a bit on the low side.

General Audio
The audio quality you get on your cell phone may be the single most important feature. As such we use professional software and hardware to ensure that we can give you the most accurate information about a phone's audio quality. To simulate the human head we use a HATS (Head and Torso Simulator) and to analyze the audio we use Listen Inc's SoundCheck software. This is the same combination of hardware and software used by many phone manufacturers and carriers. For more information on how we do our audio testing see this article

Sound Receive Frequency Response (7.55)
In this test we look at the quality of audio recieved by the Nokia E71. This is how others will sound to you during a call. The chart below indicates the E71's performance with a blue line while the limits we test against are indicated in red.

You can see that the E71 generally stayed within our limits, but there were a couple of problems that hurt its score. In particular the audio fell of rather quickly at the high frequencies, meaning some voice may sound clipped during conversation. This problem was significant enough to cause the E71 to get one of the poorer scores amongst our comparison phones, as you can see below. It's still about average for all phones, however, and certainly not terrible.

Cell Phone	Nokia E71	BlackBerry Curve 8320 (on T-Mobile)	Palm Centro (on Sprint)
Score	7.55	8.30	6.24
Received Sound Frequency Response Graph

Cell Phone	Nokia E66 (on AT&T)	Apple iPhone 3G (on AT&T)	Samsung Blackjack II (on AT&T)
Score	8.99	8.13	8.42
Received Sound Frequency Response Graph

Sound Send Frequency Response (8.26)
This test looks at the quality of audio sent by the Nokia E71. Once again the chart below indicates the E71's performance in blue while our limits are delineated in red.

You can see that the E71 did not fall outside of our limits at any point, exactly what we like to see. The E71 did very well in this test, putting up a score significantly above average and almost matching the best of our comparison phones. You should not have any trouble with the audio sent by the E71.

Cell Phone	Nokia E71	BlackBerry Curve 8320 (on T-Mobile)	Palm Centro (on Sprint)
Score	8.26	7.51	7.82
Sound Sent Frequency Response Graph

Cell Phone	Nokia E66 (on AT&T)	Apple iPhone 3G (on AT&T)	Samsung Blackjack II (on AT&T)
Score	8.35	8.34	7.02
Sound Sent Frequency Response Graph

Handset Side Tone (6.90)
Side tone is the small amount of your own voice that a phone pipes back into your ear so you can judge how loud you are speaking. Our ideal for side tone is -18 decibels. You can see below that the E71's side tone was a bit below this at -21.1 decibels. This is significant enough that it can cause problems. In particular you  may judge that you are speaking too softly, which can lead you to speak louder than you should during a conversation.

Side Tone