If your business just spent $300 million on a headphone company, you bundle those headphones with your smartphones, and you made a special point to play-up the audio quality of one of these handsets, we’d think the one thing you’d pay special attention to during product design and testing is that the phone really did sound just as good as claimed. HTC may very well be kicking itself now, as reports emerge of problems with the Rezound’s sound output.

The problem reportedly manifests itself when using the phone’s headphone jack, and sounds like static or RF interference. The included Beats earbuds themselves seem to be working fine, and have no problems in other devices; it’s just that anything plugged-in to the Rezound’s jack suffers from these issues.

Only a fraction of Rezound owners seem to be noticing any problems. There’s been no luck so far in tying to identify the exact cause of the interference, but we could be looking at any one of several phone components.

This is just the latest set of reports in what’s feeling like a trend of this type of audio issue for smartphones. Early this month we heard about the latest iPhone’s problem with echoy sound when using a headset, and just last week talked about the static interference issues with the Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro. Do you think that smartphone manufacturers just aren’t paying the attention they should to audio quality while testing?

Source: Droid-life