Sprint’s One M8 Harman Kardon Edition delivers HD audio, available May 9

Today at Sprint’s New York press event touting the virtues of wideband audio, the wireless carrier partnered with HTC to unveil a special One M8 Harman Kardon Edition. This unique handset adds to its already impressive toolbox support for Sprint’s HD audio technology, and promises superior sound for music and calls.

Available online on May 2 and in stores May 9, the M8 variant will sport an all-black finish with champagne trimmings and will include special Harman Kardon earbuds valued at $140.

The phone delivers music reproduction that holds six times the amount of data found on a CD. Using a technology called Clari-Fi, the M8 will fill the highs and lows of music often missing from standard music compression in Mp3 files.

During our brief time with it, we noticed that the handset still retained that sleek brushed aluminum design seen before in the original M8. And while Sprint’s variant lacks the actual gunmetal style, both phones still share the same slippery feel. In addition, the champagne highlights are only on the front of the device — above and below the screen. As such, we prefer the stylings of the first M8, with its ceramic accents.

The bundled earbuds, they have a very premium feel to them. They sport a solid, square metal body that matches well with the M8’s aluminum chassis.

Based on demo units of the phone Sprint had on display to demo, we can’t say definitively if the audio quality is any better. The demo music tracks we listened to opened up and had more depth and richness when the Clari-Fi and Livestage processing were switched on. However, since processing was turned on at various points of the songs, and since the original quality of the sample audio wasn’t ever given, we had no real baseline on which to base our comparison.

Inside Sprint’s exclusive HTC One M8 Harman Kardon (photos)
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Other than that, HTC confirmed the hardware components on this new One M8 are identical. That means Sprint’s variant will still feature a stunning, 5-inch 1080p display, a powerful Snapdragon 801 processor, and dual rear-facing cameras with a 4-Ultrapixel sensor.

This is a developing story. Stay tuned for additional details as we get them.