I recently picked up a new Sony Xperia 1 III running Android 11 (amongst other things, sold on the merits of its audio playback quality). Yet, when playing back audio from various apps or sources, either using headphones through its 3.5 mm output, or streaming LDAC over Bluetooth to a BTR3, it's not working well. At low volume levels, quiet audio is being noticeably and aggressively degraded. It sounds like a combination of bit crushed, badly dithered and badly noise shaped.
The hardware forces you (in Developer options) to run at 44.1 kHz for onboard audio or Bluetooth audio codecs (SBC, AAC, Apt-X and Apt-X HD) unless you choose LDAC at which point you can go all the way to 32-bit 96 kHz.
If I use Poweramp as comparison to play some audio, match levels and adjust the system media volume to the right level, I can reproduce this awful quality reduction every time. If I switch Poweramp to use its own internal FFmpeg and dithering algorithms, and pick one of the suitable algorithms, I can improve the quality at low volumes though the issue is not entirely eliminated.
I'm very surprised that the issue is prevalent over both Bluetooth and analogue output from the device. Particularly with LDAC set to 32-bit, 96 kHz. Using Poweramp Equalizer to let me inspect the signal path, I can see an inevitable SRC step during playback from YouTube music, YouTube or other system audio or third party applications. However on its own that's not usually the cause of audio degradation this severe.
To me the behaviour and nature of this issue indicates either a bad regression or bug in the OS' handling of audio streams, something Sony specific, or something at a driver level perhaps to do with the Qualcomm 888 chipset? I know years back Qualcomm took heat for badly mangling audio through unnecessary sample rate conversion steps by not properly natively supporting 44.1 kHz in hardware, but I hope that's been resolved.
Interested to hear from any other Android device users, whether they've noticed audio degradation during playback at quiet levels or with the system volume between around 40% - 90%, and whether this is actually a known issue. My previous device was a Samsung S9 with an Exynos SoC and while it has its bugs, flawless audio playback was never a problem.
I'll take some clips (audio & video) demonstrating the problem for those who are interested.
The hardware forces you (in Developer options) to run at 44.1 kHz for onboard audio or Bluetooth audio codecs (SBC, AAC, Apt-X and Apt-X HD) unless you choose LDAC at which point you can go all the way to 32-bit 96 kHz.
If I use Poweramp as comparison to play some audio, match levels and adjust the system media volume to the right level, I can reproduce this awful quality reduction every time. If I switch Poweramp to use its own internal FFmpeg and dithering algorithms, and pick one of the suitable algorithms, I can improve the quality at low volumes though the issue is not entirely eliminated.
I'm very surprised that the issue is prevalent over both Bluetooth and analogue output from the device. Particularly with LDAC set to 32-bit, 96 kHz. Using Poweramp Equalizer to let me inspect the signal path, I can see an inevitable SRC step during playback from YouTube music, YouTube or other system audio or third party applications. However on its own that's not usually the cause of audio degradation this severe.
To me the behaviour and nature of this issue indicates either a bad regression or bug in the OS' handling of audio streams, something Sony specific, or something at a driver level perhaps to do with the Qualcomm 888 chipset? I know years back Qualcomm took heat for badly mangling audio through unnecessary sample rate conversion steps by not properly natively supporting 44.1 kHz in hardware, but I hope that's been resolved.
Interested to hear from any other Android device users, whether they've noticed audio degradation during playback at quiet levels or with the system volume between around 40% - 90%, and whether this is actually a known issue. My previous device was a Samsung S9 with an Exynos SoC and while it has its bugs, flawless audio playback was never a problem.
I'll take some clips (audio & video) demonstrating the problem for those who are interested.