Should You Really Pay More for Brand-Name Audio Badges?

Should You Really Pay More for Brand-Name Audio Badges?

The badges are everywhere: on laptops, tablets, and phones. Some from brands with real audio cred: Altec Lansing, Harman Kardon, Bang & Olufsen. Other brands are familiar, but mysteriousâ€"you may have heard of Dolby, SRS, and Creative, but do you know what they do? The explosion of celebrity-endorsed headphones has pushed product labeling to a new level, too. If you wanted, right now you could buy a Dr. Dreâ€"approved smartphone.

Gadget companies didn't invent this kind of branding, but they may have perfected it. Steve Guttenberg (no, not that one), who writes the popular audio-equipment blog The Audiophiliac, attributes this kind of branding to a sort of spec-sheet arms race. It's hard to stand out in a sea of similar devices, he says, so "everybody is trying to sell by adding features." Hence the over-the-top stickers, decals, and inscriptions.

Generally speaking, a device with s pecial audio branding will sound different from an equivalent device without it. There's a good chance that it will sound noticeably better, too: Bass may be fuller, and highs a bit clearer. But what you're hearing isn't necessarily better hardware. Often, it's software.

There are certain limitations to designing an amp and a speaker system to fit inside a portable device, Guttenberg says, such as diminutive speaker size and extremely limited power supply (laptop speakers rarely exceed 5 watts). Most important, there's the issue of cost: A teardown of a typical $ 500 laptop leaves you with a bill of materials of about $ 350. Of that, less than $ 10 is spent on audio. (The small-quantity wholesale price on alibaba.com for a Realtek ALC268 audio processor and pair of laptop speakers comes to $ 7.84.) Shifting that sum upward by a few dollars, however, won't dramatically improve sound quality.

What y ou usually get when you buy a device with branded audio is special audio processing. Take, for example, the HTC Sensation XE, the first Android phone branded with Beats Audio. While the handset ships with better-than-average earbuds, its own audio hardware is undistinguished. The Beats Audio component of the phone is mainly softwareâ€"in effect, an equalizer. The buds are nice but they're an accessory.

That's not to say branded audio is something you should avoidâ€"just that there usually isn't much hardware behind that sticker and it isn't worth paying extra for. With a little tinkering you can often reproduce "exclusive" audio-processing effects by adjusting the software equalizer in your music-player app of choice.

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