[HTC 10 Guides, News, & Discussion] whitemamba:
Okay I've had enough of your snarky and condescending remarks, and I want to set things straight once and for all.

First of all, if you are using the stock Hi-Res earbuds, you should be disqualified from the title of "audiophile" straightaway. They are better than most OEM earbuds for sure, but they pale in comparison when compared to other more expensive and better quality IEMs like the ATH-IM0X series or stuff by Shure. I tried them for 5 minutes and sold them off the next day since I wasn't going to use them anyway. With these earbuds, you are almost certain not to be able to hear any differences with dithering and higher bitrates; they provide too little resolution to even produce any change in audio output. Sure, if you switch on cross-feed and EQ, you will hear some differences, but that's because you need them to make your output sound more accurate, since the frequency response of the stock earbuds is all over the place. But for other people with better IEMs and gear, we usually don't need it since our gear is tuned correctly.

Next, I hope you understand that there is no such thing as a "best configuration" for everyone. Neither is there a "best music app". There are only music apps with more options, and if people don't need or use them, they are better off just sticking with any app they like (without such a cancer-inducing UI). In fact, I'm not even sure if you know what you are doing with Neutron. Most of the "configs" you posted are UI settings, which have no effect whatsoever on audio, so why bother posting them in the first place?

Anyway as I was saying, the optimal settings for anyone depends on their own personal tastes and choices. If they like the sound, then sure, let them enjoy it. The HTC 10's stock player is more than capable of producing great sound - in fact the sound quality produced depends mostly on the DAC, and not on whichever music player you use. Personally, I use the Google Play Music app all the time, because I am satisfied with my IM02s and don't need any post-processing to alter (and likely dirty) the signal.

But for those who really insist on tweaking the sound (or just want to try it out), here are some explanations on what things mean as plainly as I can, so you can decide for yourself which settings suit you best (instead of blindly following [MENTION=291702]jauhien[/MENTION]):

Equalizer: Basically boosts the volume of certain frequencies of sound. For example, if you prefer more bass, you can up the gain on lower frequencies; if you like vocals, you can up the gain on the mids (somewhere between 250Hz to 1kHz).

Crossfeed: "Mixes" the sound of the Left and Right channels. It will narrow the soundstage a little, but some people claim the sound is more natural, with more depth. Personally I don't find this useful most of the time, and I only use it for older tracks where the mixing is weird and you have certain parts of the song with only sound on one side. An example would be the beginning of "Here Comes the Sun" by the Beatles (you can test it out with this part to hear the difference).

Surround Sound: Widens the stereo, and makes things sound more "3D-ish" with greater space. Usually used for speakers to create a more spacious feeling, and not for headphones and IEMs.

Dithering: Real sound waves are smooth because air moves smoothly, but when you try to represent a wave in 16-bit or 24-bit numbers, if you plot the signal, it looks blocky. It turns out that if you quantize a signal in the most obvious way (just picking the machine number that most closely represents the signal), the errors that you make end up having a pattern to them, and the ear can detect such patterns. Dither is a strategy for injecting a little bit of noise into the digital representation; it turns out that by doing this intelligently, you can eliminate the "regularity" of the errors and produce a signal that's more pleasing to the ear. Like everything in life, however, there's a tradeoff: a higher noise floor. But for most audio files, they already have dither. They were mastered that way. Only turn on dither if you're resampling the signal (because once you resample, you need to re-dither). Some people argue that quantization errors aren't that noticeable at 24-bit, so when you resample to 24 bits you don't need to turn on dither, but you might as well.

Resampling to 24/32/64 bit: Don't bother. It only takes up more CPU load for no audible difference. In fact, the HTC 10 DAC only supports up to 24-bit audio, so there is no point in upsampling it any further. In fact, unless you have superhuman ears, and a good pair of headphones or IEMs, you can't hear a difference at all.

These are the most common post-processing you can do, but there's only so much you can do with software. In the end, if you want better audio, you will be much better off getting a better pair of headphones. No amount of software can turn your $30 earbuds into a $200 one.

So basically, go ahead and use any app you like. There is no such thing as a "best sound", only the most "accurate sound", which may not be for everyone. Some people like more bass, some like more treble, but you cannot determine objectively which sounds better. If you want to get the most "accurate sound", which is the sound the engineers intended originally, you won't be messing around with any post-processing. And you need to have a pair of high-quality and neutral IEMs. So find the sound you like, and stick with it. Music is personal, so don't let any self-proclaimed 'audiophile' tell you otherwise. :laugh::good::good: