DxOMark is well-known in the smartphone world for its camera reviews and well, phone makers love to boast about their photography and video scores. Well, DxOMark is today expanding its reviews expertise with the addition of audio testing into the mix. It means DxOMark is now going to test out the speaker and microphones of latest smartphones in the market, offering us in-depth reviews and scores to judge their performance.
DxOMark explains why it’s introducing audio testing by saying, “Display size and quality, as well as camera features and performance, have for a long time been—and still are—major criteria for consumer smartphone buying. However, with users recording and consuming more and more video and audio content on their mobile devices, the importance of audio quality has greatly increased in recent years.”
Dubbed DxOMark Audio, we can now expect a “comprehensive, neutral, and reliable test data(set) about smartphone audio recording and output quality” from renowned camera reviewers. The company has defined a set of protocols that mirror daily use-cases of the smartphone recording audio such as voice memos, recording a street play and more. It’s also going to see how smartphones handle background noise while recording audio.
In addition, DxOMark will test the playback performance against five criteria, which have been listed below –
- Timbre (frequency response, treble/midrange/bass, total balance, volume dependency)
- Dynamics (attack, bass precision, punch, volume dependency)
- Spatial (wideness, balance, distance, localization)
- Volume (maximum, minimum, user volume consistency)
- Artefacts (noise, pumping, clipping, user artefacts, other artefacts)
Initial Audio Test Results
DxOMark Audio is already at work, reviewing the audio quality of phones, and published reviews for a handful of smartphones, to start with. These include the new iPhone 11 Pro, iPhone XS Max, Sony Xperia 1 and more. However, you would be surprised to know that initial testing has found Huawei Mate 20X to be the top-ranking phone in terms of audio quality with a score of 75 points – thanks to the stereo mics onboard.
And what’s even more surprising is the fact that iPhone XS Max manages to beat its new and upgraded version — the iPhone 11 Pro by a decent margin. The former scores 74 as compared to the 71 of the latter. Well, thanks to DxOMark, users will now have a better idea about the overall content creation capability of a smartphone. It could especially be handy for budding YouTubers, who rely on their phones to record and post videos to the Internet.
