Hi, all audio enthusiasts!
So recently I purchased a pair of Sennheiser IE80. These IEMs are known to be VERY sensitive and thus you need a really good DAC unless you want background noise in your music.
When I first plugged these IEMs into my phone I was hugely disappointed, the sound was pretty good I guess but there was this constant annoying background noise whenever audio was playing. This was noticeable even when listening to high tempo EDM music with a very low dynamic range, and when I tried some acoustic music with a higher dynamic range the background hiss completely ruined the music experience for me.
Disappointed as I was I decided to ditch LOS and get back to stock and try the audio there since I've always poor battery life on ALL nougat Roms anyway I decided to try the latest Stock Marshmallow build (B11).
The standard HiFi option sounded very poor, I think even worse than LOS but I'm not completely sure as A/B testing is practically impossible. When I turned on the Super Hifi option, however, ALL background hiss had vanished and the sound just got to another level!!! This could only mean two things; either LOS based Roms have some very funky audio processing or (whats most likely) Only stock builds use the best DAC which is presumably the AKM 4491. I haven't tried Nougat but I suspect that the audio is more or less the same ass on Marshmallow.
TL-DR: Only stock build uses the best DAC (AKM 4491).
So recently I purchased a pair of Sennheiser IE80. These IEMs are known to be VERY sensitive and thus you need a really good DAC unless you want background noise in your music.
When I first plugged these IEMs into my phone I was hugely disappointed, the sound was pretty good I guess but there was this constant annoying background noise whenever audio was playing. This was noticeable even when listening to high tempo EDM music with a very low dynamic range, and when I tried some acoustic music with a higher dynamic range the background hiss completely ruined the music experience for me.
Disappointed as I was I decided to ditch LOS and get back to stock and try the audio there since I've always poor battery life on ALL nougat Roms anyway I decided to try the latest Stock Marshmallow build (B11).
The standard HiFi option sounded very poor, I think even worse than LOS but I'm not completely sure as A/B testing is practically impossible. When I turned on the Super Hifi option, however, ALL background hiss had vanished and the sound just got to another level!!! This could only mean two things; either LOS based Roms have some very funky audio processing or (whats most likely) Only stock builds use the best DAC which is presumably the AKM 4491. I haven't tried Nougat but I suspect that the audio is more or less the same ass on Marshmallow.
TL-DR: Only stock build uses the best DAC (AKM 4491).
