Distorted sound on speaker while listening to music?

I just noticed something similar to distorted music. Sorta like the speakers clipping because of over saturation. I simply lowered the volume to improve the sound quality at the expensive of amplification. Upon further inspection I noticed that I was only getting MONO audio from the bottom speakers on the iPhone. This is evident since by covering up the left speaker -- when looking at iPhone upright -- I would muffle almost 95% of the sound and by covering up the right one it would make no difference. I thought it might be just the song in question, but testing out all my music gave the same result. I also considered that perhaps my ripped music was not properly compatible with the iPhone audio codec, so I tested an iTunes purchase song to unfortunately get the same behavior. I then laid all my doubts to rest by using the stereo headset and I did in fact get better audio and in stereo format.

I guess the question then becomes, is one of my iPhone speakers defective or is MONO only implemented for the external speakers (to possibly allow for better speakerphone performance)? I checked the user manual and the several posted teardowns of the iPhone on the web (portelligent) to find that in fact the iPhone only has one external speaker (and one mic). You can check page 10 of the user manual:

http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/iPhoneUserGuide.pdf

So the bottom grills of the device are a bit deceiving suggesting two speakers when in fact it's a speaker and mic combo.

This would explain the audio distortion at the high dB of amplitude that are clipping the speaker...

kinda wack but a small price to pay for perfection, 🙂

Dell Latitude D400 Windows XP Pro Ultralight

Dell Latitude D400 Windows XP Pro Ultralight

I noticed the same problem...when I used the equalizer in ANY setting. Upon turning it off the distortion went away. I think you can only use the equalizer with head phone. The external speaker is Mono and the earphones are stero.