Of all the thing your smartphone can do , playing medicine is one of the least demanding . take heed to a birdsong place very slight strain on the CPU , does n’t necessitate GPS , and often does n’t call for wi - fi ( so long as the music filing cabinet are hive away on your telephone set ) . Simple physics says that listening to gimcrack music should use up battery quicker , but I still need to bang exactly how much .
I ’m by all odds not the first to consider this shrewish interrogative sentence — as evidenced by threads onQuora , Reddit , andYahoo Answers — but i wanted to severally quiz this conjecture so I could be absolutely certain it ’s true . So , I charged my iPhone 5 wholly and keep it in airplane mode with all apps besides Music closed and the screen off . Then I let the medicine play .
For music I pickedSpeedy Ortiz ’s Major Arcanaand countenance it coil over and over through crummy EarPods under a mound of socks to mute the noise . Early estimates suggested it would have taken several days to drain my poor sure-enough sound ’s battery from 100 percent to nothing , so I cap each run after 5 time of day .
Image: Bryan Menegus
After playing music on one taproom of volume for five hours , my assault and battery was knocked down to 92 percent . When i seek the same exam at full mass , it resulted in … an 89 percent charge . Pretty small difference . judge by these ( scantily scientific ) results , every add ginmill of bulk will vote down a whopping 0.001875 percentage of your phone ’s battery after playing a three - minute of arc song .
For comparison , I leave my speech sound ’s display on with all apps closed and the phone set to airplane mode . After five hours , the assault and battery was brought down to 73 pct electric charge . And that was without any euphony toy . So it ’s dependable to say your display will deplete your electric battery much quicker than playing music ever will .
Some people suggest that headphones with more impedance or declamatory driver might have a more marked issue on battery usage , but I did n’t retrieve that to be the case . I ran the same test on a twosome of Seinnheiser HD 280 Pros that run at an estimated 45 Georg Simon Ohm ( as opposed to 64 Georg Simon Ohm for the 280s ) . Five hours of full - volume - blasting Speedy Ortiz later and the Sennys had puzzlingly brought the bombardment down to 90 percentage .
How these monumental DJ earphone were more effective than tiny trivial earbuds will forever stay a mystery . I considered testing some of the 600 ohm headphones on the mart , but decided that few people , if any , are in reality drag those and the matching headphone amp around with them . So I decide our test was finally complete .
Did I spend 20 - plus hours get the least useful piece of battery lifespan trivia ? Yes and no . The precise number is less of import than knowing that , in a pinch , quieter music will , surprisingly , squeeze a small more time out of your near - dead telephone set . Flip on airplane mode , kill the display , and you just might have a soundtrack for your boozy walk home .
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