[wijnands]

My daughter bought a new phone, a moto E this weekend. She came complaining about the sound quality for her music. Since I'm not at all familiar with k-pop, which suffers a lot from loudness problems anyways, I put half a dozen high bitrate mp3 files on it, Diana krall mostly.
 
At first it did indeed sound horrible until I went into the settings menu and disabled all the effects on the headphone output. After that I was quite impressed, that 100 euro cellphone beats my Samsung S2 and sounded quite decent.
 
Now I'm wondering, were my ears tired? Was I imagining things? Anyone else ever listen to this phone?

 

[Berkovajazz]

All Moto's sounds good. No marketing)

 

[wijnands]

Íf that is the case then perhaps I should put the G or the X on the list as replacement for my S2 (which sounds horrrible!)

 

[thepooh]

  Íf that is the case then perhaps I should put the G or the X on the list as replacement for my S2 (which sounds horrrible!)

On stock player, the Moto E sounds ok for the price, it should be better using 3rd party app such as Poweramp or Neutron !
 
The Moto X 2013 is surely a better deal in every terms in comparison to even S3, I haven't auditioned the new 2014 line up but they might offer better satisfaction than average smartphones at same value, I suggest that you try out before investing.
 
The S2 was a real nightmare for me, I remember having to root, cwm, sound mods, custom firmwares...I tried everything hoping to get a better sound out of it but end up selling it within 10 days of usage, that's the worst SQ I got in a high end smartphone