[HTC EVO 3D] VIRGIN KLM:
Hey everybody.

Just wanted to point out a fact about xLoud and the terrible overuse on recent ROMs/Kernels from people that have no sense of audio quality and clarity, or people that don't actualy know what a DSP is, what it can do, what it can't do.

So what is xLoud? What does it promise to do and what does it really do?

So xLoud apparently is a "technology" that can offer you "magically" more audio volume to your smartphone without changing anything to your phone as a hardware.

You know, when you have studied music technology and you know how physics and audio hardware works, reading to a phrase like this one, you know that something very fishy is going on. Reading the technology's description word by word you know that such thing is impossible to happen in real life.

So what xLoud really does to your smartphone's audio? Does it really work or it's just another thing that gives empty promises?

Breaking down xLoud:

So what xLoud really does is think how our ear and brain percieves audio and how they can take advantage of it to (obviously) fake a higher volume sound. So their idea is to take advantage of the fact that our ear has sensitivity to mid range frequencies and base everything around that. OK that's good but how can you take advantage of such thing to make a hardware perform a higher volume sound than what it does? Easy, it's called linear audio dynamic range compression. So what they do is they steal dynamics from the frequency ranges our ear is less sensitive to them and then assign the extra dynamic range to your effect. So they take the extra space and they over compress (or better over limmit) the audio to a point what you hear is simply a panic of noises since there is no dynamic range between the most loud part of a sound/track (like a kick) to the least busy part of the sound/track (a whisper) and make everything sound super-loud, avoiding the fact that our ear has also the sensitivity of dynamic range to percieve and understand audio hence they render the result amataurish, ugly, clipping and completely unrecognisable. Anyone that knows how Audition/Cool edit works can replicate the same effect very simply by opening a track of their desire then go to Effects->Amplitude and Compression->Tube-Modeled Compressor and apply these settings->

thresh: -30.db

gain:18db

ratio:12.0:1

attack: 1.0ms

release: 20ms

Then press OK and listen to the result. Sounds familiar? Doesn't it kill the track? Does it sound louder? No? So then why do you keep using it?

Also on top of that, xLoud has some bad rough edges. Because of the fact that the dynamic compressor is always on, it affects the volume levels behavior of your phone. So turning lower the level seems a bit unresponsive or the audio is not as turned down as you'd expect it to be. Also go near the speaker and start to turn lower the volume. You can hear the hiss going louder and louder as you go nearer to the silent mode. That's because the noise ratio gets raised everytime the compressor tries to higher the volume. But the worst bug of xLoud is that technicaly your phone can never-ever-ever and under no cirscumstances enter a pure silent mode. Nomatter what, your phone will always perform sounds, even if that means a very low level hiss/static sound, but there are even occasions that the compressor will take so high the peak signal that it will leak over the throttling effect of silent mode and you will be able to hear some sounds if you are near your phone's speaker.

So my point was alot of people know here that Beats is more or less a placebo like Bravia Engine is but none of these two seem to harm the quality factors they touch but Xloud on the contrary is the worst thing that can happen to your ROM/Kernel and I felt like it was about time you should know about it. Not only it is NOT loud, not only it is NOT nice, not only it's super inaccurate, but it can be proven dangerous to the hardware of your phone and nobody of the ROM developers does the mearest effort to warn their users about it because themselfs have no idea what this tool really does. I hope my post gives help to people and I also hope that there is a way I can completely get rid of xLoud and anything related to it on roms that are on XDA since just removing the apks and the lines on build.prop are proven to not be enough to make me get rid of that terrible nightmare called xLoud and seems the problem goes deep on the kernels that use it.

Many thanx for reading