Samsung Ace Cell Phone Review - Audio Quality
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Alfredo Padilla Published on April 29, 2008 Comment on this |
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Summary
The audio quality of the Samsung Ace was average for sound sent and received, with a few small issues that won't bother most people. The side tone, however, was a little on the low side, meaning you may speak louder than you should while on a call with the Ace. |
The audio quality produced by your cell phone is probably it's most important feature so we ues professional hardware and software to test it for you. To simulate the human ear we use HATS, aka Head and Torso Simulator. To analyze the quality of the sound we use Listen Inc's Soundcheck software. This is the same combination of hardware and software used by many carriers and hardware manufacturers. For more information on how we do our audio testing see this article
Sound Receive Frequency Response (8.18)
This test looks at the quality of the sound received by the Samsung Ace. The chart below shows the frequency response of the Ace with a blue line while the limits against which we test are indicated by the two red lines. You can see that the Ace generally fell within our limits but showed some interesting deviations within them. In particular at the high end of frequencies we see the sound dropping off very quickly and then bumbing back up before falling off again. This may cause high pitched voices to sound a little inconsistent, but shouldnt' be a major problem. You can see from the table below that the Ace performed right around the mid range of our comparison phones. It scored slightly higher than the average of all our phones.
| Cell Phone | Samsung Ace | BlackBerry Pearl 8130 (on Verizon) | Nokia N82 (on AT&T) |
| Score | 8.18 | 9.28 |
7.60 |
| Received Sound Frequency Response Graph |  |
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| Cell Phone | Apple iPhone (on AT&T) | Samsung Blackjack II (on AT&T) | HTC Touch (on Sprint) |
| Score | 9.17 | 8.42 | 7.44 |
| Received Sound Frequency Response Graph |  |
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Sound Send Frequency Response (7.78)
The chart below shows the frequency response of sound sent by the Samsung Ace. As with the chart above the blue line indicates the Ace's performance while the two red lines are the limits against which we test. You can see that the Ace doesn't have any major deviations from our limits but does cross the lines in a few places. In particular it's a little to low at the lower end of the frequencies and then peaks to high at the higher end of the frequencies. This means that lower voices may be harder to hear while higher pitched voices will be exaggerated. The deviations are not large, however, so the impact will be limited. You can see below that several of our comparison phones put up worse scores in this test than the Ace. Overall the Ace is slightly above average in terms of audio sent by the phone.
| Cell Phone | Samsung Ace | BlackBerry Pearl 8130 (on Verizon) | Nokia N82 (on AT&T) |
| Score | 7.78 | 8.66 |
6.50 |
| Sound Sent Frequency Response Graph |  |
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| Cell Phone | Apple iPhone (on AT&T) | Samsung Blackjack II (on AT&T) | HTC Touch (on Sprint) |
| Score | 7.58 | 7.02 | 6.56 |
| Sound Sent Frequency Response Graph |  |
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Handset Side Tone (6.68)
Side tone is the small amount of your own voice that is piped back into your ear by cell phones so you can judge how loudly you are speaking. Ideally we'd like to see side tone come in at just about -18 decibels. The Samsung Ace's side tone measured -21.32 decibels, lower than we would have liked. What this means practicallly is that you while talking on the Ace you may feel that you aren't speaking loudly enough. If people on the other end of the call complain that you speak to loudly this is probably the reason. You can see below that the Ace put up the worse side tone score amongst our comparison phones.
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