Ay,mateys! Why join the navy when yer can be pirates!? Im disappointed that you chose not to pirate the app but I offer you the opportunity to join my motley crew of pirates to make me proud once more! For quite obvious reasons @The Pirate is on board too! All I need is a few more members, a trusty parrot and a golden eyepatch so I can flex on my enemies! Join me and make me the King of The 7 Seas!.............ummmmmmm I mean join me and together we will rule The 7 Seas!

 

In this current parigdim of reality, if nobody buys shit nobody makes shit, ergo, there can be no warz to pirate. You can thank me as a pillar for supporting community...I'm a fucking rock.

 

Preach vro! YOU'RE A FUCKIN ICEBERG BABY!!

 

I don't know where you from, but in the EU some devices are locked on lower volume because of the laws in place.

 

This is bullshit, a pre-amp is for signals below line level (like a microphone or a guitar). DAC outputs line level, so the amplifier after it is not a preamp, it's a headphone amp.

This is rather due to your phone manufacturer "improving the sound", not the OS release itself. On my Moto G6 with an OS update they forced Dolby "smart audio" which since Android 9 can't be disabled using the loudspeaker, only on headphones/Bluetooth. This would've been fine, if they didn't include a noise gate at the output, so trying to quickly assess audio on the builtin is impossible.

Also, OP: you have 113dB of SPL at 1kHz with a 1V signal. At it's 18 Ohms. My HD280 are 64, and there is plenty of volume even when commuting in a bus with bumpy roads. If you need more volume, I'd advice you to check if your hearing is okay.

 

Apple makes shitty preamps. When I connect my AKGs 600ohm to my wife's MacBook Pro I can barely hear anything. /s

The quality of the preamp is really not about loudness at all. It's about flat response and transient response. Oh and my joke about 600ohm impedance phones into a laptop preamp? Well, the lower your headphones ohmage, the louder they will be. Simple. Lower ohmage headphones are easier to drive.

On the other hand, higher impedance headphones usually sound better and have flatter frequency response. That's why there are usually powerful preamps on audio interfaces, so they can drive even 600ohm headphones loud enough.

Whenever you're buying headphones, remember that the ohm/impedance value is the most important value to look for. Any cans with above 100 ohms or so of ohms/impedance will sound a bit quiet with a laptop or any mp3 player. You need a preamp for these. I'm pretty sure all the ear-buds are low impedance, though. No worries about those. Except for your hearing, as ear-buds get closer to the ear-drum and they are very low ohmage so they can get very loud. One can easily get carried away with the volume control in a loud traffic...

Cheers!

 

Last edited: Jun 25, 2020

The best but costly solution for android(But Also For ios, Mac, Win And Linux, No Driver Required), is this little thing* called Dragonfly!
Bought it 2 years ago(The Black One)and never regret it.
It has a lot of power(Depending On Model Black, Red, Cobalt), analog volume control, and it didn't care what phone model you use.
I use it on an older phone of mine, with a big battery and a case with a cable management inlay, so that the cable don't come in the way of my daily life.
You can get it for around 80 bugs, if you look carefully.

*It's An ESS SABRE DAC:
https://www.audioquest.com/dacs/dragonfly/dragonfly-red

PS:I use the mobile version of foobar2000(It's Free), because of the DSP options like Meier Crossfeed, Adjustable ReplayGain(With A Scanner Option), 2 different Limiters, skip silence detection and the fact that it uses my sanitized folder structure of the SD card.

 

Last edited: Jun 25, 2020

Except it is not a preamp, it's a headphone amp.

Just like with any device that is not designed to be used in pro audio. This is nothing surprising, the expected impedance for consumer devices is below 50Ω. If they went for a more powerful amp, your uncle could've cranked the volume to 80% and become deaf because his headphones don't require nearly as much power as yours. There are laws in place that specify maximum permitted volume for headphones, so they had to limit the volume for typical consumer devices. They weren't designed to run with your AKGs.

This is accurate, though current general-purpose (ie not audiophile overpriced junk) opamps allow 13V/microsecond. +4dBu, or 0dbFS in your audio interface is 1.736V. So jumping from absolute silence to clipping takes 0.000134ms. Good enough transient response to me. The drivers in your headphones are waaaay worse than that, so the amplifier is nowhere near being the limiting factor. Your headphones are. Also, that part can go up to 3MHz (that's 3000kHz) at unity gain - with audio interfaces it's already at about line level (1.736), which per headphone spec sheets results in about 113dB SPL being blasted to your ears at 1V - we have 1.736. That's plenty loud. And that opamp costs $0.41 per unit, or $0.10 if you're buying more than 2000 of them. It's not rocket science to get a loud headphone amp, it's just the fact that no one at the laptop company ever thought somebody would plug such a weirdo pair of headphones to a laptop.

Apart from the preamp part, this is accurate here. The preamp is what you have on your mic input, not on the headphone output.

 

Hey!

Sennheiser Momentum + Xiaomi Mi Max 3 here. The volume is REALLY loud and the bass awesome for an in-ear phone. Although, as you may know, you must PUSH the phones right through inside the ear for this to happen.

 

The trial version is limited to 15 days, it is one of the (if not the) best audio players I use on Android

best gaming laptops in india

 

Last edited: Sep 7, 2020

Most phones are limited to 0.5-0.8Vrms on their HP out. The title of this thread is inaccurate - you can't compare Apples and oranges. It's all about implementation and hardware. Volume makes huge impact on any sort of sighted comparison, non-linearities in HP amp are barely audible, as long as its designed properly.

You're forgetting the other part of the equation - efficiency. Just impedance is not enough. 600Ohm 110dB/mW HPs will be plenty loud even from sub 0.5Vrms sources.

That's not a rule, but generally speaking it's an accurate trend. There is some sort of impedance barrier, under which the driver parameters are compromised. Yes, higher impedances are better, but not quite a guarantee of any sort of "sound quality". Higher impedance headphones are less susceptible to all sorts of amping and transmission issues.

And yet, those powerful preamps have seriesed up 47Ohm resistor, which causes underdamping for anything below 600Ohm

 

Any non-linearities are going to come from single-chip headphone amp chips they are using. These days very likely it's an integrated DAC + headphone amp, and let me tell you they are certainly not using Analog Devices stuff for $10 apiece. But even the cheapest, sub-$1 100mW chips give you like 0.1% THD. This is about as much distortion as your headphone drivers have anyway.

 

I am pretty sure the Preamp in my Huawei Media Pad which has a Harman/Kardon Audio System pretty much takes a dum on everything Apple has to offer. :D

 

from https://www.ifixit.com/Device/Harman_Kardon_Speaker:

So Harman/Kardon is basically Samsung, and they use this stuff in iMacs as well. As far as I know, Samsung is not making custom audio chips, they do flash memory (SSD, RAM). So they are likely to be using off-the-shelf headphone amplifier chips just as anyone else. Selection of said chips is a concern (and can vary depending on how much of the device's budget was dedicated to audio), but it's not like Harman/Kardon is some sort of magic quality seal, anybody can pull this off.

Edit: also note "consumer audio", this is still nothing like a standalone headphone amplifier or the one in your audio interface - they need ultra low power and ultra small for phones/tablets, which translates to fewer and worse options.

 

Basically, it's not samsung. Harman/Kardon has a reputation of building some of the fines hifi consumer audio components for decades. And the speakers in the thing sound better than most peoples crappy home stereos.

So, if anybody can pull this off, why do the speakers on 98% of Tablets sound like shit??? I ordererd the Samsung A10 tablet before I got the Huawei. And I head to return it, because the sound was absolutely horrible. And no matter what you think, the Huawei with the Harman/Kardon System still shits on Apple and 98 % of Tablets out there in terms of sound quality of internal speakers. I know because I have compared a lot of them. The only thing that is close is the Lenovo YogaTab because it has a speaker bar along the horizontal stand.

Harmann/Kardon has decades of audio excellence in the hifi consumer market under there belts. In other words: it's magic!. ;)

 

Hifi consumer market was never that great (when it comes to sound quality) generally. And really, the reason most tablets/phones/laptop sound like shit is because it's at the very bottom of the priority list for most people. They would rather put 3 more cameras instead and make more sales.

Also, I was talking about headphone amplifiers. Not builtin speakers. These are too small (in case of phones) to do anything decent. In tablets, if they use two bar speakers in a stereo configuration, it's decent. In laptops there is enough space and mass to put something passable. Still, this is always "passable" or "decent" in mobile devices, never truly stunning. And it can't be, no way around physics and the sheer size of drivers required for accurate reproduction of sound across a wide frequency spectrum. That said, headphone outputs are literally one amplifier chip these days, and you'd be hard pressed to find a modern device with drastically distorted or noisy outputs, unless we're talking absolute bottom of the range devices where the total audio budget is less than $1.

 

No way.
Apple has incredible audio features.
If you can see stories on Instagram of android users from some gigs, you will find that sound is disgusting.
You better know that Apple phones are great with its volume functions.
https://www.youtube.com/@Freeringtone365

 

Last edited: Dec 19, 2024

No electret microphone built into a phone can be expected not to break up at the kind of SPL you see on festivals, really

 

Great Information.Thanks for sharing.
punjabi sad status

 

Last edited: Sep 20, 2020

The main cause for this is the difference in the quality of DAC (Digital-to-Analog Converter) and AMP (Amplifier which increases the power of the input signal) used on these devices. The location of DAC and AMP for iPhones is different for the headphones and the adapter and for Android smartphones, the DAC and AMP depend heavily on the SoC which causes to give monotonous sound