[G2 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] br0adband:
The basic gist of audio playback for myself is that I prefer to listen to recordings as intended by the mastering engineer meaning how it was "put down" for the final product. That means - since early 1985 or so (and even prior) when I got my first CD player, the original Sony portable one, as big and massive and battery hungry as that happened to be - I rarely if ever use any form of audio equalization or processing to modify the audio before it gets to my ears. I know a lot of people love to add bass, add treble, boost the lows and highs, get that "boom" going, and so on but I'm just not one of those people.

The point being: the G2 has a damned flat response curve by design because of the Wolfson DAC. Yes that can (and is) influenced to some very small degrees based on software but the hardware itself is designed to produce minimal offset from the flat response. Again, some folks don't like that and they just have to add something to it whatever that happens to be.

Now, accounting for "the loudness war" which is the process of basically pushing as many decibels across the output as possible going on 2+ decades now during the mastering process, I myself use ReplayGain to bring everything I listen to in at about 92dB which is a rather significant cut in terms of audio "volume" but since I use that level (which is 3dB above the industry standard of 89dB it gives me just a tiny bump in the overall volume but not so much as to destroy any potential dynamics in whatever music I might happen to be listening to).

Today's music and recordings flat out freakin' suck in my opinion because of the loudness thing: there hasn't been an album in probably the past 5 years that I've heard out-of-the-box that sounds good to me at the default levels - so much push is there to max out the levels that everything just has that "wall of sound" quality. Take any modern recording and rip a track - any track - to a WAV file and look at it in any sound editor: what you see is the typical maxed out "wall of sound" with no dynamics at all, no difference between what should be a softer sound and the louder stuff, it's all the same from practically start to finish.

That's bad, it's terribly bad practice and as someone involved with audio production I avoid it at all costs, always, and that means especially with my own personal music collection - I honestly haven't purchased a new CD in almost a decade now and I rely primarily on the collection I've built up since that first CD player purchase in 1985 (over 2,100 of 'em). The first CD I ever bought was Dire Straits "Brothers In Arms" which was one of the very first pure digital aka DDD recordings ever released and still one of the best CDs ever produced - I have the original pressing but they've done like 15 remakes over the years and they're all different in terms of audio levels. The original has a DR (Dynamic Range, it's a plugin for audio players that can measure the overall dynamic range of albums and recordings) rating of 16 with a minimum of 13 and a max of 20 (the highest possible). You can see the variants here:

http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=dire+straits&album=brothers+in+arms

Pretty amazing how different the releases happen to be in terms of dynamic range with that one.

Anyway, I'm just babbling now. It's your device(s), it's your music, listen to it however you damned well please I suppose. Just consider that when you discuss how things sound to you everybody is different - the hardware tends to be pretty even across the board these days. If it's a device with a Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset there's a 99.999% chance it has a Wolfson DAC in it because (the "codec" will be listed as WCD98xx) and if that's the case then you're looking at audio output quality that's about as good as it's going to get by any measure you want.

What you do from there to that audio is where things go awry...

Just for the record: my G2 uses the Dormimanx kernel which has support for FauxSound to allow me to adjust output levels of the WCD98xx audio chip so I purchased FauxSound in the past and I use a modified "Quality" preset (Analog output gain at +5 and Digital output gain at +2 - the default is -2 so I bumped it just a bit). I use a variety of headphones and IEMs depending on the situation: Sony V6, Koss PortaPros or KSC-75, Sennheiser IEMs, Shure IEMs, etc).

Works for me. ;)