T-Mobile Shadow Cell Phone Review - Audio Quality
The most important thing any cell phone does is make and receive calls, thus the audio quality during a call is extremely important. To test audio quality we use professional grade hardware and software, which is often used by the phone manufacturers themselves. To simulate the human ear we use a Head and Torso Simulator (HATS), and to analyze the sound we use Listen Inc's
SoundCheck software. For more information on how we test see
this article.
Sound Receive Frequency Response (5.68)
This test analyzes the quality of the sound received by the Shadow, so this is how well people on the other end of the call sound to you. The chart above indicates the Shadow's performance with a blue line while the limits against which we test are indicated by red lines. As you can see the Shadow rises up above our limits in two peaks across the middle frequencies, this means that voices may sound exaggerated at times. The Shadow also may clip voices at both high and low ends as the curve rises and falls pretty precipitously. As you can see below the Shadow put up the worst score in this section of any of our comparison phones.
Sound Send Frequency Response (6.40)
In this test we measure the quality of sound sent by the T-Mobile Shadow. This is how you will sound to people on the other end of a call. The chart above shows the Shadow's performance with a blue line while two red lines delineate the limits against which we test. As you can see the T-Mobile Shadow's audio sent is exaggerated across almost all frequencies, meaning people may sound boomier than you would expect. The curve also falls off pretty quickly at the high end, so voices may also be clipped occasionally. This isn't great performance, and although a couple of our other comparison phones below posted similar scores, it's sub-optimal.
Handset Side Tone (4.64)
Side tone is the small amount of your own voice that is piped back into your ear so you can judge how loudly you're speaking. Optimally we'd like to see side tone of around -18 decibels. Unfortunately the T-Mobile Shadow scored well below this at -12.64 decibels. This isn't the worst we've ever seen, but it's close. What this means in practice is that your voice will sound louder to you, possibly leading you to speak more softly than is optimal. If you use the Shadow and you find people constantly asking you to speak up, this is probably the reason.
