No mention of the DAC quality of any of the models. I’d hope the Sony one is decent.
I got the Xperia 1 VI, the headphone port seriously lacks power. It’s like half of what i’d expect from a phone. They might have bent a knee to some EU regulation. All my older cheaper phones could drive my larger cans, this one doesn’t leave much headroom.
I can’t speak on the xperia 1 vi, but I have the 1 iii and the DAC is great.
One of the reasons I’m using an lg g8 as a Digital audio player
Sony
Can’t trust them ever again. Had an XZ Premium, and they took away Miracast in an update.
And I’m still not over them taking away Linux support on the PS3…
Is that a big concern in 2024? Devices are much more powerful and audio is cheap and easy.
You’d be surprised. Good quality compact DACs are very expensive unless the manufacturer engineers a better version.
Are they though?
This isn’t the 90’s. All it needs to do us produce an analog stream.
It depends entirely on the quality of the drivers in the headphones and the listener. Portable USB DACs for audiophiles run upwards of $200.
Yes but they have much, much , much wider margins than cell phone manufacturers. Yes, phone manufacturers will add a $0.1 DAC/AMP chip instead of a $2 because of profit margins in the 100k unit range. The actual DAC IC chips that are very good are not too expensive. The metal housings are literally more expensive. It is not expensive at all to put a good chip in there, it is all the bean counters saying that they have to increase quarterly profits.
Plus “audiophile” DACs are literally 80% snakeoil. Because listening is so subjective, they heavily rely on audiophiles’ quest for placebo effect and after-purchase self justification, both of which are a strong phenomenon. Above a FIIo E10k (literally uses a PCM5102, which is very cheap ), you get massive diminishing returns. Then above the ~150 or 200 mark, they all use very similar chips and just play around a bit with distortion on DAC/AMP stacks. Without distortion, there is no discernable difference between them.
I was a signal integrity engineer for years, we can cleanly convert signals in the MHz range (>25x faster than audio signals) and process signals in the >5GHz range. Audio is literally child’s play to have near zero noise and 99% perfect analog conversion… Even a product I am working on now where the audio is medically needed to be a certain delay and fidelity to trigger biometric measurement feedback, the DAC chip is extremely cheap compared to “audiophile” gear…
There is a reason why pretty much everyone fails a blind DAC comparison. If there were double-blind tests performed, probably like <1% of the audiophile population (that is already very low) that has extremely abnormal hearing would be able to tell DACs apart consistently above a fairly low threshold.
It isn’t so much power because that’s cheap and easy. It’s the hardware processing the data. A DAC is what decides whether or not sound is clear at any given volume, and the cheaper ones have a tendency to distort or otherwise suck as volume increases
That sounds like a dated idea. Modern hardware shouldn’t have any issues creating an audio stream.
I mean, there’s a difference in DACs. Creating one is pretty universal afaik, but they’re not all created equal.
I have an old lgg7 that sounds great out of the box. My main phone, however, is a cheap oneplus, and it’s meh, but when I plug in an external DAC, the sound improves detectably, even to my old ears.
My kid’s phone is some random nokia and sounds like crap, even through my best headphones, at high volume. Plug in the DAC, clear.
It’s a thing. The on board DAC limits how volume affects sound quality for sure, and some don’t even need the volume up to start having audible breaks and distortion.
Now, some of that is android. Crappy devices benefit from a player that has its own audio processing. You fiddle around in poweramp in particular, and you can usually get things to where it’s clear enough to be bearable at high volume. But there’s still a limit if the DAC isn’t solid. But a device that has a great DAC won’t have the issue at all unless you go crazy with the eq, which is possible on any hardware or software.
My g7, maxed out, is clear as a bell at any volume, so long as the source file is good. Same with the external DAC. Both are true regardless of using the headphone jack or usbC for output, with headphones or a system (home or auto).
Slight ramble / off topic, I’ve owned a few Sony phones over the years, granted this was some time ago bit they were my go to here in the UK before they decided to add too many digets too the price, my last one was an Xperia 10 (I think, Sony’s naming convention and all that) great phone at the time, headphone jack and microSD cards, nice toolless SIM tray (which the still do I believe), spec sheet was decent etc.
But one thing I did not manage to notice while doing my research was the performance was god aweful in Sony’s android implementation at the time (at least on the 10) the underlying OS was so poorly optimised it kind of fell inside its own arse whenever doing anything more taxing than watching a video, everything surrounding it was perfect but the software.
Great phone held back by poor software, many years late I flashed Linage and rocked it as a dedicated music player, with my wired headphones and 128GB microSD and it was night and day.
On an unrlated note, I still kind of miss old Sony design language in their OS that kind of mirrored XMB in some ways especially the UI sounds and icons, but anyway the battery was going on it years ago and I lost it during a move, I still miss that phone.
Plenty of easy solutions. I’m not here to tell anyone their preferences are invalid but I personally don’t consider the lack of a headphone jack to be a deal breaker when there are easy solutions.
Some people like IP68 rated phones, and some dont.
That has practically nothing to do with having an aux port.
Mf you dont get IP68 rating unless you cover the AUX port LOL
The phones in this list literally have that in the specs
There were 30 phones released this year with aux and a ipx8 rating. It’s not a consideration worth arguing about. If the phone manufacturers wanted to have an aux port, they’d have an aux port.
Again, when you go to the manufacturers websites for those phones, they state that those phones achieve IP68 when ports are covered. If they’re not covered, they are rated IP65.
I bought 3 until I found one without awful background noise. I’m not an audiophile it was just unbearable.
Go with something like FiiO’s excellent line of Bluetooth/USB-C DACs,
btr7, btr5, btr3k. They support high fidelity Bluetooth codecs, but the USB-c option is really nice, I’ve had a btr3k for years and it’s an easy recommend. FiiO in general do really nice audio products for the price in my experience.
I’d still like to have a 3.5mm jack on my phone though and a decent internal DAC, give me an option, use something external to drive higher impedance stuff if I want.
I’m still using a Samsung S10e and its starting to show signs of wear, but I honestly don’t like any of the replacements I’ve seen that are under $1000 and I don’t want to spend that much on a phone. And unfortunately it looks hard to find older versions too.
I tried looking into old version of the Asus ROG or Red Magic phones that still performed better than my S10e but even those were still so pricy.
I’m still running an s10e as well, God I love this phone. It might be the best phone ever made, I’m not joking. I’m on my third battery and second back glass but otherwise it feels like new.
I did a little test with my dad, who has an iPhone from last year, where we would see how long a bunch of different apps would take to load. For all of them, my phone was within a second of load time (one or two was even faster). It hasn’t slowed down at all and it works flawlessly. Only problem now is it doesn’t get security updates anymore:(
S10e is great. It’s what I’ve been using as well, but it doesn’t get security updates anymore. Been using a custom rom which does get Android security updates, but there was a pretty serious SoC level security vulnerability which won’t get fixed for the S10e.
I’ll get a Pixel 8a instead. No headphone jack, slightly larger, only 1 physical sim. But can run GrapheneOS and have a long promised update period.
Yeah, that’s the part I’m worried about. I have the US snapdragon S10e, which cannot be modded to extend it’s lifespan. Which is a mistake I hope to fix with my next phone.
I stopped caring about the headphone jack when every pair I used, the wire eventually wore out. Having to buy more every couple months was getting old. I’d rather recharge my Airpods every 4 or 5 hours for 45 mins than continue buying wired headphones repeatedly for enternity.
But that’s just my personal experience. I use headphones at work, so obviously with all the constant moving around, it was hard on the wires. I don’t wish for the jack to be removed but I will never use it again for my purposes.
The Moto G Power 5g 2024 has been a great phone for me. Hard to find a phone with all the features but a headphone jack as well.
Still mostly loving my cheap Motorola g84. Rarely use the headphone jack but it’s there. The stereo speakers in it are pretty good.
Biggest gripe is it kills Facebook messenger in the background no matter what you do. WhatsApp unaffected though.
it kills Facebook messenger in the background no matter what you do
Sounds like a feature rather than a bug! Seriously though is it something like memory usage and fb wants way more resource? Is messenger light still a thing you can try instead?
Hehe. As a small town Facebook group admin, it’s useful to have it reliable, but not the end of the world.
I don’t know for sure - my suspicion is that messenger relies on some other service which doesn’t appear in the battery optimisation UI and thus can’t be kept awake. (Opening the Facebook app causes Messenger to also wake up.)
My previous Realme phone had the same issue.
Motorola g84
G84 gang!
So glad the phone model I have is not only on the list but also a 4 star. Budget phones for the win!
Now do one for phones that still have a microsd slot
Sony has both! I’m rocking a 1tb SD card at the moment that I swap into my drone and laptop for quick file transfer and it’s amazing.
Dual SIM plus MicroSD? Or either/or?
Either or. Sony phones still cost and arm, a leg and your left kidney though.
Right, that’s true. My main concern is that I need to work with 3 SIM cards regularly (German, Chinese, Malaysian) and already have to either hot swap or use a spare phone, so I’d really want to see a phone that offers a standalone SD slot without compromising at least dual SIM.
I’ve just got myself one of the aftermarket eSIM add-on cards from 5ber.com which seems to be working fine, but both my Malaysian and Chinese ISP don’t offer the functionality at all just yet. Ideally I’d want to have all 3 profiles on one, then the dual SIM wouldn’t be as needed as it is now.
I don’t know any phone that has dualsim and micro SD, but Sony atleast offer a toolless sim tray, so you don’t need a needle to remove it
Motorola E32 dual sim + micro SD. My old Nokia 3.1 had it also. Both have s 3,5mm headset jack
That’s pretty cool, but I get why most manufacturers don’t make that. Do you have 2 simtrays or 1 large one?
So technically if a phone has a dual SIM slot where the second slot is shared between SD card or SIM, you can still use both SIMs and an SD card. There are little adapter ribbons that allow you to do so. One of my previous phones was a Huawei Mate 8 that I did that with.
Would that all still fit into the SIM slot, or will the card dangle outside? Sounds interesting for sure, I’ll have a look.
Currently I’m using an external SSD that I can plug into the USB-C port, but it’s a bit bulky even with a small form factor.
One of the cards dangles out, and you do sometimes have to file the SIM tray down a hair (just the tray the slot/phone is not modified at all). A lot of the ribbons have an adhesive back and just enough length to curve around the body of the phone so that it contours the phone and sticks to the back.
Since I kept my phone in a case it was essentially indistinguishable/seamless to me.
Below is a link to an example of the adapter I’m talking about.
https://www.amazon.com/Adapter-Android-Extender-Samsung-Accessory/dp/B0C5FCZY71
Xperia 10 is their mid-range line. Got mine unlocked for 500CAD.
Moto stylus 5g has both. The review said it had bloatware, but it had way less than my S9 or z fold 4. It’s running pretty lean out of the box, with just a few moto apps you don’t really need.
My phone doesn’t have a headphone jack but has an FM radio. It took me ages to 1) realise I needed a pass through cable without a DAC and 2) find a pass-through cable without a DAC.
Does it use the cable wire as the antenna, and that didn’t work through an external DAC?
Yes exactly, so you need a special kind of usb-c adapter that doesn’t have an external DAC.
Most adapters, even the cheapest, have a dac because a lot of phones (mostly iPhones) don’t support audio pass through mode.
I want to throw Unihertz a shout-out. I only have the JellyPhone for its novelty, but as far as devices go, it does all the things an Android phone should, even with the silly form factor. It being stock Android is a big plus as well
I can’t necessarily speak for their other phones, but if the build quality is the same, I really like what they’re doing.
Never heard of them before, but part of me wants a phone with a projector.
Which ones have 1/4" jacks?
I’m holding out for one with mini-XLR myself
Some people just can’t be pleased, lol
Would that be for a direct input from an instrument, say?
nah i got some studio headphones and they got a 1/4 inch connector
I’m in the US so no Sony option but I had to stay away from Asus with their terrible update support/longevity and bootloader unlocking support. Samsung is similar on the latter portion, Motorola is bad on the former but may have to revisit their stance on bootloader unlocking for ROM support.
I would love buying a Sony Xperia if it had a better update policy and wasn’t that expensive
The price is insane. Have never been able to own a Sony phone, which is a shame
Look into the Xperia 10 VI, their mid-range. It’s not in this list, but it does have a headphone jack.
I got my daughter one of these, she loves it, but I think its a bit large
Also have you seen how narrow and tall it is? Feels like an extended switchblade >.<
Good analogy ha ha
Back in the day the motorazr was a 1:1 for the analogy haha
Xdd. Although, not anymore. 1 VI is now 18:9
I love the aspect ratio of Sony phones, It actually allows me to use it completely with one Hand, normal phones are just a bit too wide to do so comfortably.
I have a Samsung xcover 6 pro. It has the jack + 2 sims + 1 microsd + removable battery
I did not know about this line of phones, very interesting!
You too? Right on!
I honestly would have never touched a Samsung phone again had I not discovered the XCover - Pro line of phones.
