I’ve been banging on about this in tweets and posts for some time now, but the BoomSound system on the HTC One M9 is something that I appreciate. Despite the proliferation of Bluetooth speakers and headsets you’ll still find me listening to tunes via the external speaker on my phone. Most of the time this is a pretty painful experience, and it sounds like your favourite tracks are being pumped out of the smallest, wimpiest, tiniest speaker around. Imagine a fly banging his head against the side of a tin can.
Just seconds out of the box, I opened up Chrome on the HTC One M9 and listened to some tunes via the Ministry of Sound Radio player on their website. The sound is a marked improvement over every other phone on the market and now, with the aid of Dolby, you have different options to choose from. The “Theatre Mode” was a particular favourite of mine, making the music sound fuller and more enriched. Putting my face directly in front of the phone gave a glorious stereo experience too. It was really enjoyable and such a world away from the standard rear-facing tiny external speaker you usually find on smartphones. When you’re watching a movie, TV show or even your own footage, it brings you into the action and really makes you feel at home.
Demonstrating this in video can be a little tricky, because the microphone on the camera tends to adjust to match the music you can hear, but hopefully this video below will show off the difference..
It’s interesting to point out that there’s only really two modes. The “Music” mode, which is a little subdued and adds some grunt to the lower-end tones, and “Theatre” (known here as the American English spelling of “Theater”) mode. Although the latter is apparently more suited to “video or movie playback”, I found it to be my preference for music too.
The two modes above are for those large front-facing speakers though, and we should also look at the other modes which become available when you’re using the headphones.
When you plug in a set of wired headphones, you’ll get a different set of BoomSound options. The BoomSound panel in the notification shade becomes a shortcut to the Settings app, where you can switch between presets designed for various HTC earphones. They’re changeable depending on the type of headphones you have plugged in. There’s a “HTC earbuds” setting which should suit most basic headphones, a “HTC in-ear” mode for the headphones in the box, a “HTC Pro Studio” option for some HTC headphones that are sold separately and an “Other” setting which actually sounded the best for me.
More tomorrow, when we’ll have day 3 online.