iPhone 7 vs HTC 10: speaker comparison

It's time for some sonic wars! HTC's flagships have long been known for their BoomSound speakers. On the One series, BoomSound meant stereo speakers nested on the phone's front, on the top and bottom bezels. With the HTC 10, the company reworked the concept, calling it BoomSound Hi-Fi edition. What's different?

Well, the phone still has dual speakers, but they are not just used for a typical left-right stereo signal. The lower speaker was moved to the bottom frame of the device and is used as both the right channel and a sort of a “mini woofer”, mainly playing mid and low frequencies. On the top, the earpiece of the phone doubles as the second speaker. It takes care of the left channel and the high frequencies. Theoretically, when you have speakers dedicated to a specific frequency spectrum, you should end up having a better sound than what a single phone speaker would produce.

When Apple announced the iPhone 7 it too surprised us with a dual speaker setup. In part, it functions very similarly to the HTC 10's Hi-Fi BoomSound, with the bottom speaker having less bite and the top speaker compensating for that. But Apple's solution is also stereo, meaning we get true left and right audio from each respective speaker.

Seeing as these two are kind of similar in the way they function, and how HTC's BoomSound has been a staple for mobile speakers for a while now, we decided we'd pit them against each other for a quick test. First the audio, then our thoughts on the matter:

The sounds