Samsung Galaxy s4 aux playback is quiet

Shoayb Khan

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Jun 24, 2013
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I plug in the aux cable from my s4 to a JVC unit. the playback is crap. The volume is full blast but the quality is ****. I have purchased these songs from the market so the song quality is pretty good. Any idea why this happens?
 
Have you checked the cable? I use mine through my car and home stereos all the time and the sound is fine. It is a bit lower than, say, an iPod, but nothing drastic. There's a VERY thorough investigation by someone here on the forums about the S4 and low-impedance headphones, that MIGHT have something to do with what you're experiencing?
 
Hey mate. I havnt tried a different cable but i try my mates iphones and s3's and the sound is perfect on all of them. Yeah my sound is kinda faint if you know what i mean? with there is really a difference in sound. When i have my headphones is and turn the volume up it gives me a message saying this can damage your hearing or something like that. It might have something to do with that? i doubt it though. Do you know where i can find that thread?
 
I use my GS4 in my car everyday and it sounds fine, and I consider myself an audio enthusiast. I won't say audiophile, but close.

I have a totally custom stereo, all installed and tuned by myself in my car. I use an aux in cable into my Pioneer 880PRS head-unit and it is just a tad quieter than an iphone line out, but it sounds good to me. I also use my GS4 with a Vsonic GR01 (in ear monitor) and the sound is great and gets plenty loud at half volume.
 
This is the opposite of my HTC One! The playback through the stock earphones is too loud in some situations, even at the very lowest volume :-)
 
The HTC One has been said to be louder, but the S4 has been said to actually sound better and cleaner. With my Vsonic GR01 in ears the GS4 sounds at least as good, if not better than my old iPhone 4, and I never need to exceed the half way up mark.
 
I plug in the aux cable from my s4 to a JVC unit. the playback is crap. The volume is full blast but the quality is ****. I have purchased these songs from the market so the song quality is pretty good. Any idea why this happens?

Yes. A headphone out -- which is what you are using on your S4 -- is not a line-out. Driving your S4's headphone output to a high volume level causes it to distort. This is the case with just about any device with a headphone out rather than a line-out. The amount of distortion will depend on the particular device and how good its headphone out is. You may be able to get a little better sound quality if you make sure any signal processing (EQ, etc.) is turned off on your S4, but I doubt it.

iPhones have a line out that can be accessed through their 30-pin connector. When you feed this signal into an amplifier, you will notice that the volume control on the iPhone doesn't affect the volume through the amplifier. That's because it is a true line out rather than a headphone out.

As far as I can tell, the only way to get a good line-out signal from an S4 is to use an external USB DAC (digital audio converter) that has a line out jack. That will take the digital signal from the S4's micro-usb port and convert it to analog, which is what an external amplifier needs to see.
 
The HTC One has been said to be louder, but the S4 has been said to actually sound better and cleaner. With my Vsonic GR01 in ears the GS4 sounds at least as good, if not better than my old iPhone 4, and I never need to exceed the half way up mark.

I have been very hesitant to get an S4 because it doesn't have a line-out feature like an iPhone, and because many S4 owners report bad audio quality, but the only actual test results that I've seen show the S4 to be significantly more accurate and less noisy in terms of sound reproduction than the HTC One, and comparable if not superior to the iPhone 5s. After seeing that, I finally bit the bullet. I guess I'll find out on Monday! :)

Lot's of people seem to like the audio quality of the HTC One, but my guess is what they actually like is the processing done by Beats Audio or what not, which certainly DOESN'T reproduce audio accurately. Nothing wrong with liking the effects of signal processing, but it doesn't have much to do with how well a device reproduces audio.
 

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