Galaxy S9 vs. Razer Phone: A stereo speaker throwdown! By CNET

Okay, so you all know that the galaxy s, 9 and asylum plus have great features, but did you know that it also has two speakers for surround sound two speakers huh well I got two speakers right here on my razor phone as well and Dolby Atmos, sir okay? Well, that's not in Si and Plus have Dolby Atmos surround sound ?, okay, so maybe we should figure out which one of these is better I. Think it's the razor phone and I think that it really depends. There are other things anything that the razor phone does a lot better, but at the end of the day, I still kind of gotta lean toward the galaxy last night. Luckily, for you, we did four tests. We got two games, it's got to be movies, it's gotta be music. We got to do calls.

Furthermore, we did them all. So our first test was music. We played a bunch of different songs on both phones really wanted to hear a lot of different sounds and to hear how they sounded. Now. Now we have the settings exactly the same on both phones and Shawn.

What was your first impression? It really took me a sec to really figure out what I was hearing out of H because. We had the volume issue right away immediately. We're like wow the Samsung phone is louder, which I did not expect, because you think big speakers on this thing- small speakers on that little speaker on the bottom, which they can't expect any louder, but I didn't like how the s9 sounded at that volume. I was like it's too loud. It's its kind of giving me a bit of distortion, the hand, so we had to pull that down.

I absolutely agree: I got the same thing. It was like wow. If you want to kill a room with sound, it's going to be the galaxy s 9, but what is a good sheet? No, we really have to take it down a couple for the flat feeling of this until we took it down, and then I was like there are more layers in these songs. It sounds like there's more depth, more richness, app in the s9, which I did not expect either so for video one to make sure we could get some atmospheric surround sound, but also just human voices like you'd have talking to you in YouTube video. So we did both Netflix and YouTube for our video, Thanks, yeah and I thought was fascinating.

Is that there was a difference between that Netflix show that we saw that really was immersive, where you need the sound to draw you into the scene and then the voices that came from some YouTube videos and then just some of the music that was playing as part of the videos yeah. It was really richer and a lot in a large part for voices on the Samsung Galaxy s 9, but I'm really preferred the razor phone specialization you'd have all these elements all these Foley elements that made you feel like you were really part of a scene. Yet if you're raindrops, you have two footsteps: the neon sign lighting on a rat over in the corner. You could tell that the rat was in a specific location. I agree: I did notice that too I think if you weren't, if you didn't, have the phone side-by-side, it wouldn't make a difference but hearing it on the razor phone.

You definitely got a sense of what the galaxy s going last there, but I will say that when you're watching something more instructional or when you're watching an interview with somebody that the voices came out much louder and clearer and that scene we were watching somebody screams that sounded a lot more convincing, like painful rich on the s9, even in the Netflix surround sensing. I didn't get the surround sound there, but I did get that that got a role Valkyrie kind of screaming about it. Oh, yeah yeah for simple games like Super Mario, run I, think it didn't really make much of a difference which phone you were using and maybe even if you're, using stereo speakers at all or not collecting coins ding-ding-ding sounded roughly the same, maybe a little different, but not the better coins. It's not like coins yeah, but then I think when we moved along to the more advanced game like yeah we're planks of Riptide GP renegade we've got our little wave race thing going. I thought the splashing water sounded a lot more three-dimensional on the galaxy s now.

I was right there with you and I thought that it was a little more suppressed a little muted on the razor phone, so we're kind of an agreement there, but where we are still pretty close, it's still fairly close, like I, wouldn't pick one over the other, because for both of these games the sound doesn't really matter. You might play them with the audio off anyhow game-like Puget, though, where you've got people hunting each other on an island. That's all around you, you're trying to survive a lot of people use headphones for that game any out and on the razor phone it sounded much more three-dimensional. Much more sounds around me, so I could tell where things were coming from. I couldn't do that with guests on it.

So, at the end of the day, I mean if you're somebody who's serious about playing games and the razor phone is definitely going to take that one home for you, but I think that on the galaxy s4 and if you're still comparing it between a phone that has stereo speakers or not, it's still going to be a better choice. But one last thing you can block the speaker on the essence. You have to watch out for that. If you're playing games in landscape mode, you might block the speaker, that's a perfect point. Yeah, where is the razor phone, is definitely a gamer's phone.

One more thing you might use speakers for how about speakerphone calls so to test this on both phones. We use the exact same SIM cards, same network and even the same caller mm-hmm, and we found out right away was that the razor phone was loud enough immediately. We were like. Furthermore, we got a boost up this volume. Thankfully there was a little volume boost button, but then we noticed it was a little.

Yeah, I actually said that it sounded like somebody was holding a pillow over the face of the person we were speaking to the weapon, which is a little alarming, but this person sounded pretty distant and very muffled, but not garbled, so we thought razor phone. Maybe it's not going to be as good as the s9, so we went over to the SMI, and it was a hundred times worse. It had all the volume total distortion and I think you actually called it garbage. It sounded like garbage sounds like hot garbage on the line. There were all these things in the background that we could hear over the line, they're being amplified by the phone, little pops and quirks and things like that: yeah audio artifacts and then, when we actually boosted the volume and just amplified all the problems, so I would say for me raise our phone wins and try never to use the speakerphone on the galaxy s 9, unless you absolutely must so, we've tested them out, but at the end of the day we have to make a decision, Sean, I have to, say for the games.

In the movies, the razor phone is my pick, even if it doesn't have the audio quality for music. It's got almost everything I wanted two speakers, just maybe not everything. I wanted to find I think that if you're, not a big gamer, and you listen to a lot of music, the Galaxy S, nine definitely is the better choice because it gives you that richer sound, and it gives you that depth I. Think at the end of the day, you know the Galaxy S nine is the phone that most people are going to hear of, and it shows that Samsung has got a little more work to do, because the razor phone definitely wins in some categories. Yeah.

Source : CNET