Nokia N73 Review - Audio Quality

Alfredo Padilla
Published on May 04, 2007 Comment on this

The N73 is an attractive handset, but that’s no use if the phone makes you sound like Bela Lugosi with a head cold. To examine the audio quality of a cell phone, we test them using a combination of software and hardware: the software is a professional audio analysis package called SoundCheck (from Listen, inc) and the hardware is a Head and Torso Simulator (H.A.T.S) from Brüel & Kjær. Both of these products are used by many of the cell phone manufacturers themselves to test their 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 (4.47)

Our tests on the receive sound that the N73 produces (such as someone talking to you on the phone) had some serious issues; the frequency response of the N73 (shown by the blue line) was outside of the limits (indicated by the red line) for pretty much the entire frequency range. WE expect to see some variation here (and the limits account for this), but the N73 has a very odd frequency response: lower frequencies (on the left of the graph had a very poor response, while the higher frequencies on the right had a very strong response. This would make voices sound high and reedy, and could make it harder to understand what people are saying.

Sound Send Frequency Response (6.22)

The frequency response of the sound that the N73 sent (such as you talking into the phone) was much better; the response of the N73 (shown by the blue line) was inside the limits of the standard that we use for most of the frequency range. It was only outside of the limits at the lower end of the range, and then it was only by a small amount. There were also no huge peaks or troughs in the response indicating that no frequencies were overly exaggerated or ignored.

Handset Side Tone (6.33)

Side Tone is how you hear your own voice on a cell phone; you can’t hear yourself speak because the cell phone is blocking your ear. Cell phones deal with this by injecting a certain amount of your own voice back into the speaker so you can hear yourself. If they didn’t do that, you would instinctively talk louder and become one of those annoying people on buses, yelling when there is no reason to. The amount of your own voice that the phone feeds back to you is critical; too little, and you start talking loudly. Too much, and you whisper and the person on the other end of the phone can’t hear you. To paraphrase the three bears, the N73 is just about right; we measured the side tone average across the frequency range at -21.66 Db. The standard that we use calls for this to be about -18Db, so that’s just a touch below. But that’s definitely acceptable; if you find yourself yelling into the N73, it’s because you’re in a bad mood, not because you can’t hear yourself speak.

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