We subjected the Apple iPhone 14 Plus to 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 break down how it fared across a variety of tests and several common use cases.
Overview
Key audio specs include:
- Top front, front, bottom right, side
- No audio jack output
- Dolby Atmos technology
- Spatial audio reproduction
Reproduction
Pros
- Good performance in all attributes, with great consistency in all of them
- Great tonal yield overall, enriched by a deep low-end extension
- Excellent dynamic performance overall
- Excellent spatial yield
versus
- Distortion and compression at maximum volume and when watching movies
- The stereo is still reversed in the music app, like on all iPhones
Registration
Pros
- Good tonal rendering overall
- Good performance when recording high volume content such as concerts
- Good dynamic performance
- Good management of artifacts overall. The wind noise reduction needs some fine tuning, but it works decently
versus
- Midrange rendition depends too much on the use case and can sound crafty or nasal depending on the app and use case
- The SNR could be higher, as the main vocal 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 have generally been 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 iPhone 14 Plus’s overall audio score was only a point below the 14 Pro Max’s score, well within our margin of error, we direct you to the results. complete with the iPhone 14 Pro Max test.
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