The "Smartphone for Snapdragon Insiders" vs ROG5 Preview: Branded vs Original

Audio - 3.5mm vs TWS Argument

We’ve seen the industry move away from 3.5mm jacks to promote wireless audio – and the Smartphone for Snapdragon Insiders is a good example of that    , especially in the juxtaposition against the ROG Phone 5 which does feature the jack.

Qualcomm here is risking quite a bit in terms of promoting their “Snapdragon Sound” brand – the MW08S earbuds case literally have a “How sound should sound” label inside of the battery case – a statement that’s almost certain to backfire if the earbuds don’t actually perform admirably well.

Starting off with frequency response curves, I pitted the MW08S against a pair of Jabra 75T’s which Qualcomm also had sent out in last year’s Hawaii event, as well as a pair of $27 BLON-BL03’s wired headphones which are regarded as performing extremely well for the price range. The measurements here were calibrated to 90db SPL pink noise, and all earbuds were using identical tips.

Unfortunately, the MW08s seem to be characterised by a large trough at 2.5KHz as well as larger peaks at 5.5KHz. Generally, I would ignore anything above 10KHz as my measurement setup here isn’t particularly accurate to proper professional equipment. The Jabra units provide a much flatter sound signature, though there’s quite a notable low bass boost.

MW08 Distortion

A further problematic aspect of the M&D buds is a peak of very high distortion from 3.5 to 6KHz, peaking at over >6% THD+N, which is a quite horrible figure. On the positive side, low frequencies on the MW08’s are very clean.

Jabra 75t Distortion

The Jabra 75t’s in comparison have worse bass characteristics, however the majority of distortions are mostly kept under 1% THD, with only a smaller peak at 2.8KHz.

The high distortion characteristics of the MW08’s are I think responsible for a much narrower and more muddy sound-stage, that well inferior to the much cheaper Jabra earbuds.

Again, to be able to be able to properly convey the sound experience, I’m recording and comparing actual music (the excellently mastered Chris Jones – Long After You Are Gone) as recorded on the MW08’s compared to the aforementioned BL-03 wired headphones. As a reference, I’m also switching over audio to the original audio track source, and switching in-between the sources and recordings as highlighted in the video. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to record the Jabra 75t units in stereo due to the units disconnecting from each other in the test rig, and recombining independently recorded channels resulted in an inaccurate representation.

There are two important aspects to note about the MW08’s – although the instrumentals are quite good, it’s noticeable that the vocals are very much underrepresented and feel a bit muffled, which would correspond to that 2.5KHz trough in the FR. Secondly, this recording in my view gives a good representation of the narrow sound stage of the MW08’s, which is very evident compared to both the original source as well as the BL-03’s. The MW08’s here also fared worse than the Jabra 75t’s which also had a much wider sound stage and imaging capabilities.

Finally, I wanted to take opportunity to talk about TWS DAC noise. Because wireless earbuds/headphones generally have to deal with battery power, their DACs are amplifiers are generally quite weak and more conservative in their designs, in order to achieve better battery life. One aspect that’s I’ve noted for years here is that most audio solutions still suffer from horrible noise floor characteristics, which is accentuated by extremely slow and non-responsive noise gating. Noise gating is when the DAC cuts off its output to the speakers.

Overall, the MW08’s – while for me had quite good and respectable ANC, just in my opinion fell apart when it comes to audio quality at this price range. The Jabras at half the price sound significantly better, and both get blown away by a set of $27 Chi-Fi 3.5mm wired earphones.

Unfortunately the industry’s move to drop 3.5mm jacks is very much motivated by the much higher profit margins of TWS – however at $299 and part of this $1499 Smartphone for Snapdragon Insiders package that presents itself as “How sound should sound”, this strategy just falls apart and is rather quite insulting, especially considering the cheaper ROG Phone 5 is able to provide true high fidelity sound via the 3.5mm jack.