Best smartphones for audio

Your smartphone is your gateway to music, podcasts, and all things audio. It’s crucial to pick a device that brings out the best in your favorite sounds. Quality audio enhances every beat and word, turning a mundane listen into a dynamic experience. We’re going to zero in on the smartphones that excel in audio performance. From stellar built-in speakers to robust audio features and compatibility with various headphones, the devices on our list ensure that you hear every sound as intended. We’ve rounded up the best audio phones, from having a headphone jack to stereo speakers, so you can find one that hits all the right notes for you.

The best phone with a headphone jack is the Sony Xperia 1 V

To enhance immersion, the device uses full-stage stereo speakers with high-resolution audio and Dolby Atmos. It also provides Sony’s Digital Sound Enhancement Engine (DSEE) and a dynamic vibration system. The device has a host of audio software features, such as an audio equalizer and mixer and an app called Music Pro, a paid service that allows you to record vocal and instrument audio and upload it to the cloud for processing.

The Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra has the best speakers

ASUS ROG Phone 8 is best for wired listening while gaming

ROG Phone 8 specs:

Apple fan? Get the iPhone SE for cheap, or splurge on the iPhone 15 series

I will just come out and say it: Apple is bad for the audio market. It’s even worse now that its phones no longer ship with a dongle. Not only is its Bluetooth compatibility limited to AAC, but its war against the 3.5mm jack also led to the most foolish smartphone design memes of the day. It’s irritating that people look to it as some sort of market leader when it only fits the description if you’re looking at how much tax it dodges in the US.

However, the iPhone SE is a special phone that is a credible contender for the value phone crown. So, as much as it pains us to praise it, this is the phone to get if you don’t need a headphone jack but do need to save some coins. There are some notable advantages, like Apple’s H2 chip, which allows for much more stable connections with other Apple peripherals and Beats headphones. Additionally, if you want to get into the world of AirPods or AirPods Pro, this is the phone to get.

With a refreshed design in 2022, this $429 phone is in close contention with Google Pixel A-series phones (which we no longer include here after they dropped the headphone jack). The “not having a headphone jack” thing is a tough hurdle to overcome, but if you’re in the Apple ecosystem, no phone has one, so you may as well save the money for listening to music on the go.

iPhone SE (2022) specs:

We still aren’t fans of how Apple treats the audio industry, but if you have the money to splurge, the iPhone 15 series has some of the best speakers in mobile. All four devices have dual speakers, one in the earpiece and one firing downwards, that are very well-tuned, and we had no issues raising the volume. As it goes with mobile phone speakers, the bass isn’t great.

iPhone 15 Pro Max specs:

On a budget? Try the Samsung Galaxy A15 5G

Galaxy A15 5G specs:

What you should know about smartphone audio

Smartphones have come a long way since the video below was released four years ago, but it still gives a good overview of the challenges faced by smartphones when striving to deliver a great audio experience.

While objectively collected data is all well and good, it doesn’t exactly tell you everything you need to know about a phone’s performance. If you bought a phone in the last five years, chances are it’s more than enough for you unless it lacks a specific feature you want. Now that digital media’s performance has started to sail beyond the limits of our hearing perception, test results matter less and less — while features matter more and more. It’s extremely rare that one phone will sound much worse than another when used with popular streaming services.

When it comes to wired listening, the lower the distortion and noise, the better the result. Similarly, the lower the deviation found in testing frequency response, the less the sound will be altered. While some people like to artfully tune their music, any component other than the headphones or the software playing back the music shouldn’t affect the signal at all. Only deviations + /—3dB will be noticeable at all.

Few phones have issues here, but it’s not unheard of for a modern phone to have some weird issues here (*cough* the original Pixel *cough*). The frequency response test is more pass/fail than anything.

It will sound trite, but every single one of the phones listed here is all that we’d categorize as “perceptually perfect,” given their performance meets or exceeds what your average human can hear. However, they’re not actually perfect, and users with more power-hungry headphones may run into issues.

In our testing, we noticed that the phones with dongles (Apple iPhones, Google Pixel devices) refused to output sound at the specified sample rate. We have no idea why this happened, but we could reproduce our results almost exactly between several different copies of each device with three testers. The upshot is that these phones should have an easier time dispelling IM distortion, but the tradeoff is that it technically isn’t performing as well.

While you shouldn’t really be able to tell when you stream music, ultra-hardcore wired-listening-only audiophiles might be unimpressed with this. It’s just as well—that crowd should avoid dongles if they’re using power-hungry headphones anyway.

Those who want to use Bluetooth audio must ensure that their phones and headphones speak the same language or codec. If they don’t, you likely won’t be able to enjoy your music as much as you could. Not all phones are created equal with Bluetooth support, and it’s worth knowing what codecs you can use on your mobile.

However, software updates can change the checkmarks on this list, so prepare for it to change over time. Many of these phones will eventually support aptX and LDAC through updates to Android, while Apple’s support remains beholden to a tough-to-predict update schedule.

How do we test phones?

Using a dedicated audio interface, we measure the output of each phone. Using a software called Room EQ Wizard, we can measure things like dynamic range, distortion, noise, frequency response, and more. By logging these results, we can compare each phone against each other under the same test conditions with the same test files and the same equipment.

We can get a lot of information from a simple 96kHz/24-bit test file. We load the file onto the phones, play it back, and record the results. We did not use a higher-bitrate/higher-sample rate file; CD quality sound is “only” 44.1kHz/16-bit, and that’s more than sufficient to satisfy the perceptual limits of the vast majority of humans on Earth. We go with roughly double the highest common settings that most people will use. In this case, it is something that would meet or exceed CD quality because no streaming service can do that currently.

Speaker testing is fairly rudimentary. By playing a pink noise sample at full volume, we can measure the output with a microphone pointed directly at the phone. The front-facing units, on the whole, perform better than those on the bottom of the phone, given the sound is actually directed at the user.

Obviously, the existence of extra features and other concerns like Bluetooth have to factor into our decisions. However, these are generally present on the flagship phones and a few others. While our testing pool was artificially limited, companies had to shell out big bucks for licensing Bluetooth profiles and codecs. Generally, less expensive smartphones will also only include a few codecs, whereas the flagships will cover nearly all of them.

Frequently asked questions