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Huawei Mate 50 Pro
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Huawei Mate 50 Pro Audio test

OTHER AVAILABLE TESTS FOR THIS DEVICE

We put the Huawei Mate 50 Pro through our rigorous DXOMARK Audio test suite to measure its performance both at recording sound using its built-in microphones, and at playing audio back through its speakers.
In this review, we will break down how it fared in a variety of tests and several common use cases.

Overview


Key audio specifications include:

  • Two speakers (Top center, bottom right)
  • No Jack audio output

Scoring

Sub-scores and attributes included in the calculations of the global score.

Huawei Mate 50 Pro
Huawei Mate 50 Pro
144
audio
151
Playback
144

158

137

149

155

162

142

162

111

157

131
Recording
122

147

124

146

122

159

109

170

145

Best

105

166

Playback

Pros

Cons

Recording

Pros

  • Effective noise reduction
  • Memo recordings in stereo
  • Effective audio zoom feature

Cons

  • Mediocre tonal balance in most recordings except life video
  • Slightly stronger than average distortion
  • Heavy background processing results in a poor background tonal balance and very noticeable artifacts


The Huawei Mate 50 Pro is a good smartphone for audio playback, delivering a pleasant sound signature and overall experience, with good tonal balance as well as good dynamics, spatial and  volume performances.

The smartphone also offered some nifty features as well in the recording area, including audio zoom and a very effective background noise reduction. However, the Mate 50 Pro did not quite perform at the same level as in playback, lacking consistency between use cases.

Test summary

About DXOMARK Audio tests: For scoring and analysis in our smartphone audio reviews, DXOMARK engineers perform a variety of objective tests and undertake more than 20 hours of perceptual evaluation under controlled lab conditions.
(For more details about our Playback protocol, click here; for more details about our Recording protocol, click here.)

The following section gathers key elements of our exhaustive tests and analyses performed in DXOMARK laboratories. Detailed performance evaluations under the form of reports are available upon request. Do not hesitate to contact us.

Playback

151

Huawei Mate 50 Pro

163

Black Shark 5 Pro
How Audio Playback score is composed

DXOMARK engineers test playback through the smartphone speakers, whose performance is evaluated in our labs and in real-life conditions, using default apps and settings.

The Mate 50 Pro is an excellent smartphone for audio playback, offering an overall nice timbre and homogeneous tonal balance, with clear treble, pleasant midrange and a satisfying lower part of the spectrum. It also did very well in our dynamics tests, thanks to sharp and precise attack as well as great bass precision and punch. The Huawei created a fairly wide audio scene, but given the device’s large dimensions, we would have expected even more. Localizability was great, with individual sound sources easy to pinpoint, and balance and distance rendering were both accurate.

The Mate 50 Pro also delivered a good volume performance, with good intelligibility at minimum volume and a very loud (but slightly harsh sounding) maximum volume level. Audio artifacts were fairly well under control, but some compression and distortion were noticeable at maximum volume.

Listen to the tested smartphone’s playback performance in this comparison with some of its competitors:

Huawei Mate 50 Pro
Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max
Xiaomi 12S Ultra
Recordings of the smartphones playing some of our music tracks at 60 LAeq in an anechoic environment by 2 microphones in A-B configuration, at 30 cm
Here is how the Huawei Mate 50 Pro performs in playback use cases compared to its competitors:
Playback use-cases scores

Timbre

144

Huawei Mate 50 Pro

158

Black Shark 5 Pro

The Timbre score represents how well a phone reproduces sound across the audible tonal range and takes into account bass, midrange, treble, tonal balance, and volume dependency. It is the most important attribute for playback.

Music playback frequency response
A 1/12 octave frequency response graph, which measures the volume of each frequency emitted by the smartphone when playing a pure-sine wave in an anechoic environment.

Dynamics

137

Huawei Mate 50 Pro

149

Black Shark 5 Pro

The Dynamics score measures the accuracy of changes in the energy level of sound sources, for example how precisely a bass note is reproduced or the impact sound from drums.


Spatial

155

Huawei Mate 50 Pro

162

Black Shark 5 Pro

The sub-attributes for spatial tests include pinpointing a specific sound's location, its positional balance, distance, and wideness.


Volume

142

Huawei Mate 50 Pro

162

Black Shark 5 Pro

The Volume score represents the overall loudness of a smartphone and how smoothly volume increases and decreases based on user input.

Here are a few sound pressure levels (SPL) measured when playing our sample recordings of hip-hop and classical music at maximum volume:
Hip-Hop Classical
Huawei Mate 50 Pro 74.8 dBA 71.1 dBA
Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max 74 dBA 71.1 dBA
Xiaomi 12S Ultra 72.6 dBA 69 dBA
The following graph shows the gradual changes in volume going from minimum to maximum. We expect these changes to be consistent across the range, so that all volume steps correspond to users’ expectations:
Music volume consistency
This line graph shows the relative loudness of playback relative to the user selected volume step, measured at different volume steps with a correlated pink noise in an anechoic box recorded in axis at 0.20 meter.

Artifacts

111

Huawei Mate 50 Pro

157

Asus ROG Phone 5

The Artifacts score measures the extent to which the sound is affected by various types of distortion. The higher the score, the less the disturbances in the sound are noticeable. Distortion can occur because of sound processing in the device and because of the quality of the speakers.

Playback Total Harmonic Distortion (Maximum Volume)
This graph shows the Total Harmonic Distortion and Noise over the hearable frequency range.
It represents the distortion and noise of the device playing our test signal (0 dB Fs, Sweep Sine in an anechoic box at 40 cm) at the device's maximum volume.

Recording

131

Huawei Mate 50 Pro

160

Honor Magic6 Pro
How Audio Recording score is composed

DXOMARK engineers test recording by evaluating the recorded files on reference audio equipment. Those recordings are done in our labs and in real-life conditions, using default apps and settings.

The Huawei isn’t quite as good as a recording device as it is for playback, but it still offered a decent performance in our testing. Timbre was good when recording with the main camera but left room for improvement with other applications as the tonal balance sounded muffled with both selfie camera and memo app. Dynamics performance was overall subpar, although envelope rendition was still pretty good with main camera recordings. Signal-to-noise ratio was also good in both main and front camera recordings.

Main camera videos offered average localizability of sound sources and a slightly narrow sound scene. Voices also sounded slightly further away than they should have been. With the selfie camera in portrait orientation, the audio scene was even more narrow, with very blurry localizability. On the plus side, memo recordings on the Mate 50 Pro are in stereo, offering good wideness and localizability.

Recording loudness was consistently good across all use cases but recordings of loud content were strongly impaired by compression and distortion. Very distinct distortion was also noticeable on sudden loud noises. The Huawei’s heavy noise reduction algorithm caused phase issues in some recording elements. Background was heavily processed as well, resulting in a poor background tonal balance and very noticeable artifacts.

Here is how the Huawei Mate 50 Pro performs in recording use cases compared to its competitors:

Recording use-cases scores

Timbre

122

Huawei Mate 50 Pro

147

Honor Magic3 Pro+

The Timbre score represents how well a phone captures sounds across the audible tonal range and takes into account bass, midrange, treble, and tonal balance. It is the most important attribute for recording.

Life video frequency response
A 1/12 octave frequency response graph, which measures the volume of each frequency captured by the smartphone when recording a pure-sine wave in an anechoic environment.

Dynamics

124

Huawei Mate 50 Pro

146

Black Shark 5 Pro

The Dynamics score measures the accuracy of changes in the energy level of sound sources, for example how precisely a voice's plosives (the p's, t's and k's, for example) are reproduced. The score also considers the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), for example how loud the main voice is compared to the background noise.


Spatial

122

Huawei Mate 50 Pro

159

Vivo X Fold

The sub-attributes for spatial tests include pinpointing a specific sound's location, its positional balance, distance, and wideness on the recorded audio files.

Recording directivity
Directivity graph of the smartphone when recording test signals using the camera app, with the main camera. It represents the acoustic energy (in dB) over the angle of incidence of the sound source. (Normalized to the angle 0°, in front of the device.)

Volume

109

Huawei Mate 50 Pro

170

Black Shark 5 Pro

The Volume score represents how loud audio is normalized on the recorded files and the how the device handles loud environments, such as electronic concerts, when recording.

Here are the sound levels recorded in the audio and video files, measured in LUFS (Loudness Unit Full Scale); as a reference, we expect loudness levels to be above -24 LUFS for recorded content:
Meeting Life Video Selfie Video Memo
Huawei Mate 50 Pro -25.9 LUFS -20.4 LUFS -19.6 LUFS -21 LUFS
Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max -26 LUFS -22.9 LUFS -19.2 LUFS -19.6 LUFS
Xiaomi 12S Ultra -28.3 LUFS -20.8 LUFS -19.1 LUFS -20.4 LUFS

Artifacts

145

Huawei Mate 50 Pro

Best

The Artifacts score measures the extent to which the recorded sounds are affected by various types of distortions. The higher the score, the less the disturbances in the sound are noticeable. Distortions can occur because of sound processing in the device and the quality of the microphones, as well as user handling, such as how the phone is held.

In this audio comparison, you can listen to the way this smartphone handles wind noise relative to its competitors:

Recordings of a voice sample with light background noise, facing a turbulent wind of 5 m/s

Background

105

Huawei Mate 50 Pro

166

Black Shark 5 Pro

Background evaluates how natural the various sounds around a voice blend into the video recording file. For example, when recording a speech at an event, the background should not interfere with the main voice, yet it should provide some context of the surroundings.

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