We put the Apple iPhone 14 Plus through our rigorous SBMARK audio test suite to measure its performance both when recording sound using its built-in microphones, and when playing audio through its speakers.
In this review, we’ll analyze how it performed in a variety of tests and several common use cases.
Overview
Key audio specs include:
- Front top, front, bottom right, sideways
- No audio jack output
- Dolby Atmos technology
- Spatial audio reproduction
Reproduction
Pros
- Good performance in all attributes, with great consistency between them
- Excellent overall timbre yield, enriched by a deep bass extension
- Excellent overall dynamic performance
- Excellent spatial performance
Versus
- Distortion and compression at maximum volume and when watching movies
- Stereo is still reversed in the music app, as it is in all iPhones
Registration
Pros
- Good overall timbre yield
- Good performance when recording loud content such as concerts
- Good dynamic performance
- Good artifact handling in general. The wind noise reduction needs some tweaking, but works decently
Versus
- The rendering of the midrange depends too much on the use case and can seem canny or nasal depending on the app and the use case
- The SNR could be higher, as the main speech content is often somewhat masked by ambient noise
- Poor audio zoom performance
The differences between iPhone models when it comes to audio playback and recording are usually minimal. The same is true now with the release of the iPhone 14 series.
The iPhone 14 Plus, which contains the A15 Bionic chipset, shares many of the hardware specifications of the iPhone 14 series models, except that the 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max both run on the latest A16 Bionic chip.
In playback and recording, the audio performance of the iPhone 14 Plus was identical in all categories to that of the iPhone 14.
Given all the similarities between the iPhone 14 series models, and that the overall audio score of the iPhone 14 Plus was just one point below the score of the 14 Pro Max, well within our margin of error, we direct you to the results complete with the iPhone 14 test Maximum professional.
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