3.5mm Headphone Jack Quick Note
Speaking of headphone playback, one thing I wanted to do late last year was reintroduce audio jack playback quality evaluation. This was something that was triggered by the loss of headphone jacks by many vendors who replaced them by low-quality 3.5mm dongles with bad audio quality. Only Apple unfortunately managed to deliver a sensible dongle with good audio quality.
During this testing I noticed that another difference between the Snapdragon and Exynos units is the audio quality of the DAC. The Exynos units have this reputation of being the ones with the high quality audio playback quality, but this is mostly just reputation based on these variants having Wolfon/Cirrus Logic audio chips, and not actual measurements.
Publishing audio measurements is like opening up Pandora’s box in terms of what I’m getting myself into, as very many people get it wrong. In many cases what you’re measuring isn’t actually the audio playback the audio device, but rather the input characteristics of your measurement hardware. Another popular mobile review site has as such been hitting the limits of their audio interface for several years now, with the resulting numbers not actually showcasing much of the capability of the devices at hand anymore.
As such, even my own figures here will be hitting the limits of my own measurement hardware, but if we keep in mind that these are not definitive measurements of the devices, then we can have a more balanced view. In particular for the Galaxy S10, these are very
indicative of what you’re to expect as a difference between the two units.
Snapdragon Galaxy S10+
The Snapdragon Galaxy S10 continues to showcase excellent results with what was in line with Qualcomm’s Aqstic line of DACs over the last few years: a very clean output with very little noise.
Exynos Galaxy S10+
Switching over to the Exynos Galaxy S10 however we’re seeing some pretty shocking results. The phone uses a Cirrus Logic CS47L93 audio codec chip which has actually been used in Exynos variants since the Galaxy S7. Unfortunately in recent years this was surpassed by Qualcomm’s audio chips, and in particular the Galaxy S10 suffers from a pretty bad implementation. Here we’re clearly seeing noise components that are not part of the reference 1KHz signal, with a particularly odd 250Hz component. The measurements were done in sequence with just re-plugging the input from the Snapdragon to the Exynos under the same conditions. Audio output level was calibrated at near -10dbV / 312.5mV RMS on both devices.
In practical terms, there is audible difference between the two as the Exynos unit sounds warmer (in a bad way) and more muffled. The Snapdragon achieves higher clarity and the sound stage appears wider. This was my subjective evaluation using the same Samsung’s included AKG headphones on both units, both having the same software audio settings.
I applaud Samsung for still including the 3.5mm headphone jack on the Galaxy S10 – however a big part of the world will unfortunately experience lesser audio quality on their model variants.
