Using Your Smartphone As A Dedicated Music Player Guide
Many people now own a smartphone, and most actually run Android. We all now (including myself) use our phones for music playback. It’s just easy to buy a song from Google Play then download it within the app or stream it. Their are people (including myself again) that prefer sound from a high end sound card or dedicated high end MP3 player to enjoy their tunes. However in recent times on-board sound has become surprisingly decent on computers, and just as good in our phones. In fact sometimes our phones can outperform that of the onboard sound in our computers. That though really depends on how much your motherboard costs and phone, as higher the price generally better sound card onboard of it, back on to phones though. Our phones have also had a recent upgrade with their sound solutions. Before most “smartphones” some phones had MP3 player functionality but they usually sounded just terrible with rolled of bass, and lack of detail in the highs department.
Thanks to the new smartphone race manufacturers are pushing themselves to create the best phone available on the market. However many forget about one thing - sound quality. Headphone sound quality on most Android’s is fairly decent however the built-in speakers are mostly described as atrocious. Still some phones excel at sound quality better than others, however this is almost very limited if you use stock earphones or cheap headphones to listen to music with. Hooking your phone up to powered speakers is also dependant on this, however it will not pull as much power from the DAC - so if the DAC is weak it will still sound plenty loud enough hooked up to powered speakers. Again, quality of speakers depend on the speakers and the phone.
Just because the phone has a good DAC will not mean great sound quality either. There are a few other factors within the phone itself. The DAC shielding is a big one this essentially blocks out unwanted CPU and radio noises because cell reception is radio waves that make sound, and some phones CPU’s may actually run at a similar frequency as the DAC and interfere which causes annoying static like noises. Where the DAC is placed, and how it was installed is also another one. This one is similar to the interference from other hardware but where the DAC is placed will determine the amount of interference and easy access to a headphone jack. How other components handle audio processing is another. For example the CPU may be to slow (almost never however) to render higher quality audio files this is now mostly eliminated with almost every phone now. The DAC might also sound a tad better if it also had a amplifier accompanying it - especially true on high end or difficult to drive headphones. You will find phones like the HTC One M series will have smoother bass and better definition on headphones because of it. If you own a phone without an amp, you can pick a portable one up to drive most headphones at a price as low as $30 like the Fiio E6 for example. Your DAC might be decent, but have you considered what the output is made from? Some lower end phones may be made from cheap materials which will create interference and strange noises in your mix.
Now that we have chopped down the hardware side of things, lets change the subject a little bit to the software implementations and restrictions. Just because every side of the hardware is great, don’t expect stellar audio quality if the OS or software your using is not “bonding” with the hardware or not well optimized you could experience poor quality or stuttering. Most Androids overcome this now, it is not so troublesome anymore. Okay so if the OS is optimized then what equalizers or sound mods are actually implemented? Audiophilles complain that eq’s do not do their ears justice nor the audio mods but some of us like to punch up our music (especially MP3 files). With factory mods and equalizers like BeatsAudio, Sony Clearaudio, Wavesmaxx and SoundAlive we can sparkle up music to make it sound how we like it. However if you are one of those that are a purist best you turn these features of or not use them - you could always just look for another phone without these mods at all.
We have now talked about the DAC, software and hardware side of things, now lets have a look at how the music is actually made.
So a digital music file is a bunch of 1’s and 0’s, however how are those 1’s and 0’s captured? We must first use a microphone the hook that up to an ADC (analog to digital converter) to capture sound. That sound is then captured by the ADC, processed by a computer and finally outputted as a digital file (the 1’s and 0’s).The quality of this file depends on similar things to how your phone computes the music, however the quality of the microphone also has a drastic effect. Obviously, the better the quality microphone the better the quality of the recorded sound. Some microphones excel at recording different frequencies or sounds. For example the mic in your phone is specifically tuned best for voice recording to assure smooth voice calls. However a microphone that is advertised as recording percussion might be tuned to accurately record that specific instrument range - and other instruments might sound inaccurate or less lively.
The DAC to the ADC now choosing the best headphones or earphones for you. If you are still using the stock earphones that came with your phone - stop! The will sound extremely mediacore and maybe alright at best. Consider three things price, quality and comfort and if you prefer headphones or earphones. Headphones are the big mostly bulky things that usually sit on your head. These things are usually much better than earphones and can sound much better for just over half the price of earphones. Headphones are more accurate, and can create really low subwoofer like bass unlike earphones which are usually pretty good but are unable to accurately display low bass properly and without some decent volume bass like headphones. Some earphones also fall short for quality defined highs as some lower end earphones may have these higher frequencies boosted, but sound nothing like a good much more high end pair. Also take note headphones are much too bulky to wear all the time which could hurt your head or ears and they look just so goofy!
Comfort and quality fall under the price and brand you are willing to pay for. Some lower end earphones and headphones may sound better, but have less comfort or vice versa. High end listening devices will combat both, but cost you more. DO NOT buy these things just because of the brands - do homework just because you like bass do not always just look at Beats By Dre their are by far much better bass driven headphones out their. But if you are willing to pay for these sorts of brands just to look cool, go ahead - i’m not stopping you, just informing you.
The next chapter is the type of file you are playing (format), and where you are playing it from. Google Play Music streams music as MP3 files @ 320Kbps which can be changed to a lower value if your going over your monthly data usage by streaming. Spotify also streams in 320Kbps with MP3 files, and you can also set a lower quality rating. As per say, lower quality streaming use much less data maybe half as much but some songs may lose their “sparkle” or interesting parts. This also applies to offline use, you have more flexibility here as you can buy either MP3 files, FLAC’s and other types of music files. Note that Flacs hold the best sound quality and are not trimmed of their sparkle or detail as supposed to a MP3 file. Many will not tell the difference between a 320Kbps MP3 as supposed to a FLAC file either because they just can not naturally tell or their headphones or DAC are just not up to the job. MP3 files still sound good but do not buy anything under 256kbps quality in MP3 as you are getting ripped of for true quality. Flacs usually cost more, and are less commonly available but do sound better. Do note, a single Flac file can use 100MB of space, so be careful of your remaining storage space.
Into the last can of worms finally, *phew*! And that is things you can do the simply improve quality of your music being played. You could try shopping for an amp or even amp+dac combo. Portable amps and dac’s are quite cheap now and Fiio sell quite a comprehensive amount of decent products like so. I first started with the Fiio E6 amp and on my sort of low impedance headphones (64ohms) I heard differences in how tight bass was. It was no longer afraid to show itself, and the Fiio’s bass boost option gave it a bit more mid bass (6DB+) for a warmer listener experience. That was just a $30 amp I picked up for cheap. Later on unfortunately it died so I was forced to buy a new amp. This time I looked into one, but it also included a built in DAC - it was a combo 2 in 1! When i plugged this into my phone it never worked at first, I had to download USB Audio Player from Google Play as my Galaxy Nexus could not natively play from a usb DAC. When I listened to music from it for my first time, I was astonished at how well it fared against my friends PCI sound card. Comparing it to my phones built in DAC the USB DAC was an improvement, but my phone still sounded pretty good for it’s age.
Some more things i’d like to add is that specs are not as always as they seem. When you hear big fancy things like 8Hz-32Khz frequency response for example it’s good but to be honest you can not typically hear anything under 20Hz, and over 20Khz. Also watch out for SNR and THD. A SNR of 100 and up will sound acceptable, try to get something beyond that for better quality audio. These specs will not determine how much bass will be shown, nor how the headphones/DAC will sound but will give you an educated guess at it.
Another thing I would like to mention is Audio Mods. There are various Audio Mods amongst the XDA community. These mods improve sound quality by means of post processing and updated sound files. The post processing is fast, and not very CPU intensive at all. These mods will dramatically increase sound quality where possible - whether it be perceived detail and bass it will have your audio senses tingling at mercy’s end. You can try my mod out and see for yourself here. Just flash it with your recovery, and you are all good to go.
Thanks for reading!
I'll update this thread in the future if something changes or I decide to post more info. :good:
