[Verizon Samsung Galaxy S III] Nazo:
So I'm looking over the current options and right now it's not really looking like it's promising. I have my Galaxy S3 rooted and with the help of tools like TitantiumBackup I've managed to clean up the stock ROM pretty well. Another thing of note is I actually get some surprisingly good sound quality out of my SGS3. I realize the US models aren't supposed to have the Wolfson DAC, but somehow mine sounds absolutely incredible with no noise that I can hear or anything (it's enough that I've been wondering if Samsung might have slipped the Wolfson into this one and perhaps there is variance in the DACs actually being used.) It even drives my headphones (modified HD555s -- basically you can consider them to be like the HD595s since of course I did the foam mod, but with the soundstage mod and a custom cable they're actually a bit better possibly) extremely well. It's worth noting that I have frozen the built in equalizer or whatever it was that I thought seemed like it was meant to mess with the sound (I like my devices to produce a relatively neutral sound.) Despite some complaints out there, I actually like the sound out from my US model SGS3 better than things like my Cowon D2 (which, btw, has a Wolfson DAC) and don't even use my CMoy (which has an AD8620 OPAMP that makes it sound far better than a typical OPA2132 CMoy IMO at only the cost of a bit of battery life) which I love the sound of because to me it sounds amazing on its own.

I only mention all of this because while I'm not a true audiophile per se, quality is of extreme importance to me all the same and I'm reading of issues with sound in the current custom ROMs which is not something I'm ok with. I want it to continue to sound this amazing. The idea of losing sound quality with a custom ROM bothers me. I like the idea of a few of the updates like Project Butter (though it's worth noting that mine does run fairly smoothly since I keep the number of programs running all the time as minimal as I can) and I really like the idea of having a custom ROM where I could maybe tweak more things (perhaps including better battery life options like maybe a better CPU governor built in? It drives me crazy how much my phone can run down over just a few hours while the screen is off even with SetCPU set to set the CPU to 384MHz and switch to the powersave governer with WiFi and mobile data both disabled and me not receiving any calls or texts.) For that matter, even while on it's not helping as much as it seems like it should, but I can't help but to notice that there are some more advanced CPU governors that I don't seem to have as an option and I wonder if perhaps a custom ROM could even help there as well. Plus I just plain like being able to tweak more things to my exact preferences instead and again a custom ROM helps. But, if I have to give up that sound quality that's a big problem. I think also it might be a problem to lose the camera. I don't use it a lot, but every now and then I really do kind of want to have it. Especially it would absolutely suck to lose the ability to scan QR codes or to have to do so via the front camera, but every now and then I do take some actual photos to share.

So my question is, have any of the custom ROM options out there reached that level of stability and quality to actually be worth updating and without losing those two things? The SGS3 has been out a fair while now, so it's hard for me to believe that there hasn't been a bit more progress along these lines, but I realize that it's no simple process to create a custom ROM all the same. (In fact, I only think more progress would have been made than what I've read thus far because the SGS3 is just so very popular. If it had been a less popular phone I wouldn't necessarily expect that much, but between its features, hardware, and etc, it's a pretty popular phone.) I want all the benefits of a custom ROM, but what I've read so far of them says to me that it's just not worth the trouble. Once I find one that really works I kind of want to stick to it as much as I can as I have a lot of apps installed and configured just so for my preferences. It sounds like I'm going to have to wait a good while yet though. Or have any of the custom ROMs finally "gotten there yet"?