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 mysterious?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. Dre?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 special 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 you 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 software?in effect, an equalizer. The buds are nice but they're an accessory.

That's not to say branded audio is something you should avoid?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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