[Nexus 6  General] cb474:
Yeah, AnandTech does great reviews. They are one of the few (only?) sites that really understand the technology.

And Brian was great. (I believe I read that he was hired by Google.) Sadly with his departure they stopped doing reviews of the noise cancellation on phones. He would place a call to another phone and record the call, while turning up a babble track by the first phone and talking until he couldn't here himself anymore. Then he'd post the recording in the review to show how well noise cancellation worked at different volume levels. Brian was the only person seriously reviewing noise cancellation in phones. And he came up with a way to objectively compare different phones.

The tiny handful of other sites that even bother to mention noise cancellation in reviews (PhoneArena often does) just make some sort of subjective observation like, "callers said we sounded great." It's really not useful and often makes the differences between phones seem much less than it really is.

I care a lot about noise cancellation (I'm often on calls in noisy places) and it has bizarrely been going backwards (fewer and fewer companies use the superior Audience noise cancellation chip and opt for the very much inferior Qualcomm's Fluence instead--I guess it comes for free with the Snapdragon chipset). The Nexus One was the only Nexus phone with the Audience chip (and one of the first phones to have it, before Apple even). Every Nexus device after that has had far worse noise cancellation. (The Nexus S had no noise cancellation! Galaxy Nexus had something crappy, I don't know what it was. Nexus 4 and 5 have Qualcomm's Fluence, though for some reason the Nexus 5 is a little worse/more glitchy with noise cancellation than the Nexus 4.)

I think most people don't understand how truly great noise cancellation can be. There's a real difference between the Audience chip and Qualcomm's Fluence. And other solutions are even worse. Apple dropped the Audience chip from the iPhone 4 for an sucky in-house solution in subsquent iPhones. Motorola's Crystal Talk has not been that great. Although I've heard one or two good reports about the four microphone noise cancellation in the 2nd Gen Moto X. It's the first use of four microphones for noise cancellation. Even three microphones is incredibly rare. But I have yet to test the noise cancellation in the 2nd Gen Moto X myself, so I'm reserving judgement. I do hope that the Nexus 6 has the four microphone noise cancellation from the 2nd Gen Moto X. Maybe it will be the first Nexus phone since the Nexus One with good noise cancellation. If it doesn't, I may opt for the 2nd Gen Moto X over the Nexus 6 for this feature alone.

(As a side note, only Samsung has consistently continued to put the Audience chip in all of its flagship phones. LG dropped the Audience chip in the move from the G2 to the G3. HTC dropped it in the move from the One X to the One. Also some of the Chinese manufacturers like Xiaomi, ZTE, Huawei, Meizu, and Lenovo use it lately, in one or two of their phones. Like 1/3 sensors, use of Qualcomm's Fluence seems to be another place where manufactures have decided something is good enough, even though there's much better technology out there, and most consumers don't know enough about the technology to understand they're missing out on something. And of course, people who review phones don't get it either and/or ignore the topic, leaving users in the dark and putting no pressure on manufacturers for something better.)

Anyway, off topic noise cancellation discussion aside, AnandTech reviews are still great even without Brian Klug. Joshua Ho is doing a good job with the reviews. And he's super nice and will respond to emails personally. He says he hopes to bring back the noise cancellation part of the review, but lacks the equipment at the moment. Here's hoping.