We asked, you told us: Audio quality is extremely important when buying a phone

Headphone jacks have disappeared from most flagship smartphones. Although LG and Samsung still retain the port on some of its devices, who knows how long that will last.

One of the primary reasons people prefer to use the 3.5mm jack over Bluetooth is audio quality. So we decided to ask you, how important is having a headphone jack and decent-sounding speakers when buying a phone? This is what you had to say.

How important is smartphone audio to you?

Results

It’s pretty clear that the nearly 1,000 people who participated in this week’s poll find having a headphone jack and decent speakers to be extremely important when buying a smartphone. Looking through the comment section, it appears as though most prefer LG’s decision to include a DAC for improved audio quality.

It is interesting to see a good number of people state that they believe that the headphone jack should be no more. But in exchange for dumping the port, companies should focus on making the smartphone’s speakers sound as good as possible.

Noteworthy comments

Here are some of the best comments from last week’s poll explaining why they voted the way that they did:

• Want good speakers, don’t want a headphone jack. Let the past die
• Headphone jack is a must. Speaker quality expectation rises with increase in price. For something like poco, I wouldn’t mind a downgrade in sound quality as long as it keeps the price down.
• While I don’t care much about the speakers, the presence of a headphone jack is a requirement. I’m not willing to be in a situation where I suddenly need to connect a pair of earbuds to the phone to listen to something and not be able to do it because it needs either Bluetooth or a dongle.
• I have a op6 but rarely use the jack, nowadays you can get wireless buds with very good quality, I am quite happy with my jabra 65t. That said I do way more importance to a dedicated DAC like LG does. Ah! For the love of God please do not use your speakers in public transport you noobs! And by the way if you do not use headphones for a video cal it isn’t a video call anymore, its a conference call(public) get it?!
• I have a Pixel2 XL. No headphone jack. The audio type-C dongle works fine for my wired headsets. Yeah, it ‘s a bit ugly but I don’t care.
• Oh yah. I need QDAC and Dolby Atmos as well. Thumbs up for external stereo speakers.

That’s it for this week, everyone. As always, thanks for voting, thanks for the comments, and don’t forget to let us know what you thought of the results below.