We put the Apple iPhone 15 Plus through our rigorous SBMARK Audio test suite to measure its performance in both recording sound using the built-in microphones and playing audio through its speakers.
In this review, we’ll break down how it performed in a variety of tests and several common use cases.
Overview
Key audio specifications include:
- Front top, front, bottom right, side
- No jack audio output
- Dolby Atmos technology
- Spatial audio playback
Playback
Pros
- Good performance in all attributes, with great consistency between them
- Excellent tone rendering overall, enriched by a deep extension in the low range
- Excellent dynamic performance overall
- Excellent spatial performance
Against
- Distortion and compression at maximum volume and when watching movies
- The stereo is still reversed in the music app, as in all iPhones
Registration
Pros
- Good tonal performance overall
- Good performance when recording loud content such as concerts
- Good dynamic performance
- Good artifact management overall. Wind noise reduction needs some tuning but works decently
Against
- Midrange performance is too use-case dependent and can sound slick or nasal depending on the app and 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 in terms of audio playback and recording are generally minimal. The same is true now with the release of the iPhone 15 series.
The iPhone 15 Plus, which has the same A16 Bionic chipset as the iPhone 15, shares many of the hardware specs of the 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max, which both run on the latest A17 Pro chip.
The iPhone 15 Plus’ playback and recording scores were identical to the iPhone 15’s results.
Given all the similarities between the iPhone 15 series models, and considering that the iPhone 15 Plus’ overall audio score was just 2 points below the 15 Pro Max’s score, which is well within our margin of error, we direct you to the full results of the iPhone 15 test. iPhone 15 Pro Max.
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