Hey all,
My phone doubles up as a walkman for around 2 hours a day does anyone have any experience of a decent enough smart phone that has very good headphone output?
iPhone. The old-type standard 'phones are crap, the new EarPods are really pretty good, Shure SE215's outstanding. The new Sony Xperia looks very tasty, and has Sony's experience with the whole Walkman thing. No experience with anything else, so can't comment. Earphones will make a big difference to overall sound quality anyway.
2p - ching!
My new Sony Xperia sound quality is streets ahead of my old HTC.
Galaxy S3 sounds fine to me, but I'm not a gold plated cable kinda guy.
Proper earphones/headphones/taste in music will probably help too.
I have some custom fit earphones I made from some sennheisers and an earplug kit, they work very well indeed. I'll check out the Sony range,thanks.
J
iPhone 5 has a decent Cirrus audio DAC and sounds good.
The Galaxy Nexus is okay, but not as good as the old Galaxy S to my ears. My wifes Sony Xperia Pro sounds excellent, as does the Galaxy S3 I tested.
I am using Sennheiser IEMs and some (expensive and loud but not very decent sounding) Sony DJ headphones.
If you are a proper hardcore audio nerd, you could use an external DAC for your headphones, to avoid the possibly low quality one in your smartphone. You basically need either an iPhone and an apple specific DAC, or an Android phone that supports "USB On The Go" and a USB DAC. Galaxy SIII with the latest update will support it apparently, probably most modern devices with up to date software.
Joe
The iphone and android support class compliant audio interfaces (via the camera connection kit on the iPhone) - the iPhone has quite specific power consumption requirements though - something like an Apogee One USB audio interface would give the best possible quality audio output from a smart phone on the move -
If you really wanted to go down the audio quality route, then you could use an audio specific kernel to replace the standard linux one in Android which will give you less jitter on the output (the difference is likely to be inaudible on the bus, through the vast majority of headphones).
Broadly, the DA conversion is passable in most modern gear, and it's not worth worrying too much about the difference at that point in the signal chain - the quality of the source files (high bit rate MP3's are an effective compromise) and the quality of the headphones are much more important.