Hi everyone. So, you might remember when the
HTC One M8 was released I wasn't overly impressed with the audio quality
that we were seeing from Boom Sound. For my mind it appeared that Boom Sound wasn't
really doing a right lot.
It could very well just be an icon sat there in the settings menu
and it's not really doing anything at all. Certainly my opinion was the audio
quality
over both the headphones and the speakers was subpar compared to
the M7. Now in part this was due to the removal of
Beats Audio. Beats Audio was a system that HTC used to own.
They sold their stake in the company and apparently replaced it with some generic
Boom Sound thing
which effectively just appears to be a preset EQ for
the speakers which makes them nice and loud. Well, here's the thing. If you put
loud speakers on something you're going to get a loud sound but not necessarily good separation
between
low, mid and high audio values. So the main issue that I have really with
the M8 is
well, if you're buying it to be the best music and audio device on the market
I'm afraid it simply isn't. Certainly not compared to the M7 anyway.
So, it was really interesting when we saw that Sprint had done a deal with
Harman Kardon for the M8 that was going to be released on the Sprint network
to include Harman Kardon's brand new Clari-Fi technology.
Now, if you're not aware, Clari-Fi technology is
really an algorithm that analyses a compressed audio file
and tries to replace the missing areas of the audio.
When you compress something to mp3 or, you know for any streaming format, what we tend to
do is
we remove bits of the audio that apparently human ears can't hear.
Now this is usually the very low frequencies and the very high frequencies.
But the problem there is that you actually lose some of
the kind of definition, the clarity that would normally have been
in that audio file. So, you know, even if you take something like a CD
a CD is actually compressed audio. The only true way to hear your audio,
the way as it were the artist originally designed it
would be to use vinyl. So the interesting thing that Clari-Fi technology
is it analyses your mp3, your audio stream from Spotify, Google music or wherever
in real time on the DSP and it then fills in
the missing spectrum of data that has been removed from compression.
Now I was really sceptical of this. I saw the patent a few years ago when they
first announced they'd come up with this idea and it appeared to be
really, really clever but I was sceptical.
You know, you're adding in information that has effectively being removed and even if you do that
algorithmically
there is going to be some problems. You're going to have
certain types of audio that for some reason won't work. Well,
having now patched my HTC M8
with the Harman Kardon software, effectively removing Boom Sound completely,
I have to say this is a complete revelation. The Harman Kardon
Clari-Fi audio system, it really does work by the way,
you know, it takes your audio and
certainly in all of the songs I was really annoyed with when I'm trying to listen
to it on the M8 with Boom Sound
it feels like all of that missing information
the lovely texture, the warmth, is back.
I can now hear in my tunes pieces of audio that had
disappeared before, had vanished, were simply no longer there
and they're ultimately bits that make up the mix of a track
which help to fill out the bottom end, top end of the audio
that give you that kind of I'm in a club right now vibe.
And that's something that's quite remarkable really for this technology.
So I'm just going to quickly play you a piece of music and as you can see here
Clari-Fi has two settings, on or off, and live stage is used if you're having
a set of headphones plugged in. Now just to give you an idea of the difference
between the two
with Clari-Fi just turned on either on speakers or on
the headphone jack what you'll find is it boosts the bass,
the mids and the trebles up quite high but
at the same time replacing that information that was missing from
those areas.
What live stage does is it takes that slightly overcooked bass sound
when you're listening to it on headphones and it just pushes it back down in the mix
so that it sits at the low end as opposed to kind of feeling like it's bleeding into the
mids
too much. And for my mind having tried a range of different audio
wow does it work! I mean it really does make
your headphones sound fantastic again in a way that unfortunately the Boom Sound
it just never got there. It was never capable of delivering audio quality like this.
So let's quickly put a piece of audio on. Now bearing in mind that we're not doing
this
through the headphones, we're using a HDMI connection here to line into our
editing desk. So what you'll find is
we're not going to be playing around with the the headphones setting we're
just going to play around with the pure
Clari-Fi setting but you should be able to hear a difference. Now
this does make, this is slightly more difficult to kind of
demonstrate because there's a lot of compression YouTube is going to do to this
video
which will also compress the sound quality a bit and also then
how you're listening to it back on your headphones or your speakers so you may
notice a subtle difference
but you may not hear exactly the same difference that I'm hearing here. So
let's pop this track on first. Now,
slight problem, I can't actually hear the audio from here
because everything is running through my desk. Now hang on one second, let me just check something. Ah yes,
pop my headphones in, plugged into the desk
but anyway let's go though it.
You've got that track there
turning it on,
turning it off.
So what you should be able to hear is the mid tones kind of feel like they've expanded a bit.
Let's pop that back on for this.
Now what I'm going to do, I'm just going to quickly
throw some bass on so we'll just
forward this track. In fact actually this might be
a mix that has.
So that gives you a rough idea as to
how the audio is kind of transformed when you're using
the Harman Kardon Clari-Fi technology. To me, what I hear
is a kind of dullness in the original track
without the Clari-Fi technology turned on. It almost feels like
the kind of sweeter bass notes and those lovely high ends are
kind of just pushed down and compressed into the middle spectrum.
When you turn the Clari-Fi technology on those ranges are expanded dramatically
including in some parts of that track, you may or may not have been able to hear
there was a very low gain
vocal loop just in the back of the mix. Now you can barely hear it
at all with Clari-Fi technology turned off. With it turned on
you can hear it's there and that's just like you would hear it in a club.
Those lovely little audio tricks that
producers put into their audio tracks. Normally in a compressed
sound file they disappear. They're just vanished. With the Clari-Fi technology
it brings that all back to life.
Now one thing we should really kind of discuss
is why did HTC do this? Why did they remove the
Beats Audio putting Boom Sound when clearly this technology was available
and ready to go
for the M8s across the world? Yet apparently it seems to have been left to
Sprint to do a direct deal with Harman Kardon for this technology.
It's baffling frankly. If I was to grade
the HTC One M8 based on its audio quality
not with Harman Kardon I would say it's crap.
Frankly it is absolute junk compared to Beats Audio
it is junk. Put Harman Kardon on this device
and suddenly you're looking at the best smartphone made this
year. Simple as that. However, without
Harman Kardon, without Beats Audio, with just Boom Sound in this device
I'm afraid it's just not very good. You might have put a great set of speakers in there
but you've hobbled it with atrocious software HTC
and all you had to do was hand over
a couple of quid per device and you could have had
the device of the year. I mean, that's a remarkable thing really considering
HTC's position right now is so precarious you would think they would
want to
push hard to have the very best on the market
by a long way. This appears to be
a massive own goal on HTC's part. They could have had the best smartphone
for 2014 by delivering a phenomenal all
rounder but actually what they've delivered is a somewhat substandard
device in the audio department and as I discussed previously
the camera system is just a gimmick anyway. The loss of optical image
stabilisation there was a major problem.
If you have the HTC One M8 and you would like this Harman Kardon Clari-Fi
audio system all you need to do is root your M8 device,
and go over to the XDA Developers and you will be able to grab
a patch file that you can run through your recovery,
install onto the M8 and you will have this software running
on your M8. You don't have to go and buy Sprint's device this software patch will
work on
all variants around the world, including the international model we're using here
and straight away you've suddenly got the best smartphone on the
market. Simple as that. There was no reason in my opinion for HTC to have
done
it this way. They should have had this Harman Kardon audio system in there
from launch or at very least I should expect to see this patch
in, in a future update. For whatever the cost Harman Kardon are charging for this
it is worth every penny. Whatever the license fee
is, HTC should just pay it. It's as simple as that
because it could be the thing that actually saves them, you know? No other
manufacturer
has this technology right now and all for the sake of a small license fee.
If you don't have Harman Kardon audio on your M8
and you feel like rooting, or you're already rooted then go for it because
it makes this device really, well, sing!