{"id":2481,"date":"2026-10-05T14:06:36","date_gmt":"2026-10-05T20:06:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.faberacoustical.com\/blog\/?p=2481"},"modified":"2026-10-05T14:06:38","modified_gmt":"2026-10-05T20:06:38","slug":"measured-iphone-18-pro-microphone-frequency-response-and-directivity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.faberacoustical.com\/blog\/2026\/ios\/iphone\/measured-iphone-18-pro-microphone-frequency-response-and-directivity\/","title":{"rendered":"Measured: iPhone 18 Pro microphone frequency response and directivity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Frequency Response<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I measured the frequency response of the iPhone 18 Pro microphone by positioning a lab-grade reference microphone (PCB model 377C01 connected to model 426A14 phantom-powered preamp) 0.5 mm away from the phone (facing the mic) in our anechoic chamber. The reference mic was connected directly to input 1 of an RME ADI-2 Pro FS R dual channel USB interface (A Mackie phantom power supply was used to power the mic preamp). The iPhone microphone signal was routed directly to a USB-C to 3.5mm headphone adapter using SignalScope\u2019s audio play through function (with measurement mode enabled) and from there to input 2 of the ADI-2 Pro. The response between the 2 microphones was measured with SignalScope\u2019s Dual FFT Analyzer (on a Mac) with the microphones facing toward and away from a loudspeaker which was generating a swept sine excitation signal. The 2-microphone arrangement was rotated 180 degrees between measurements and the individual measurements were then averaged. The average measurement was corrected with the factory-supplied frequency response of the reference microphone for both pressure and free-field acoustic sensitivity. The graph, below was generated with SignalScope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
iPhone 18 Pro microphone frequency response, corrected with factory-supplied data for the pressure (blue) and free-field (green) response of the PCB 377C01 reference mic.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This year, I switch to a 1\/4″ reference microphone for the iPhone measurements, since a 1\/4″ mic more closely matches the thickness of the iPhone itself than the 1\/2″ microphone used previously. This makes more sense for direct comparison between the 2 microphones and, indeed, the difference between the measurements made at different orientations was considerably smaller than for the iPhone 17 Pro measured with the 1\/2″ mic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Directivity<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

For directivity, 1\/3-octave sound levels were measured as the phone was rotated around its microphone at 1.5 degree increments. A single, full-range, coaxial-driver loudspeaker generated the broadband test signal that ran for the duration of the measurements. Spectra in all resulting measurements were then accessed to generate a set of polar data for each frequency band. Several of these polar data sets were loaded into SignalScope\u2019s Polar Plot tool to generate the graph, below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Note:<\/strong>\u00a01\/24-octave smoothing is applied to the frequency response data. No smoothing is applied to the polar plot data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\n
\"SignalScope<\/a><\/div>\n
Learn More About SignalScope X<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Frequency Response I measured the frequency response of the iPhone 18 Pro microphone by positioning a lab-grade reference microphone (PCB model 377C01 connected to model 426A14 phantom-powered preamp) 0.5 mm away from the phone (facing the mic) in our anechoic chamber. The reference mic was connected directly to input 1 of an RME ADI-2 Pro FS R dual channel USB interface (A Mackie phantom power supply was used to power the mic preamp). The iPhone microphone signal was routed directly to a USB-C to 3.5mm headphone adapter using SignalScope\u2019s audio play through function (with measurement mode enabled) and from there to input 2 of the ADI-2 Pro. The response between the 2 microphones was measured with SignalScope\u2019s Dual FFT Analyzer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2482,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72,3,20],"tags":[227,213,251,98,30,11,216,22,136],"class_list":["post-2481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hardware","category-iphone","category-news","tag-anechoic-chamber","tag-directivity","tag-frequency","tag-iphone","tag-measurement","tag-microphone","tag-response","tag-signalscope","tag-top_post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.faberacoustical.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.faberacoustical.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.faberacoustical.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.faberacoustical.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.faberacoustical.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2481"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.faberacoustical.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2486,"href":"https:\/\/www.faberacoustical.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2481\/revisions\/2486"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.faberacoustical.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.faberacoustical.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.faberacoustical.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.faberacoustical.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}