[Android Software Development] Alanon:
[MENTION=4445176]guitardedhero[/MENTION]: I just bit the bullet and spent around an hour testing all the different variants of the Exodus, now that it seems more stable and especially that it has Atmos available for it. As always, I tested on headphones only.

First I tried the stock Exodus, with the Dolby off - it was pretty bad for me, there was nothing special in the sound, so I flashed Dolby On immediately. There are two distinct Dolby tweaks, I used the alternate one, for no reason other than that it had a couple of extra lines in it, so why not. In retrospect, I'd like to know why there are two of them, and what are the intended differences. The sound was noticeably better, but still it seemed somehow lacking. The [MENTION=5079472]sonophilos[/MENTION] tweak was the best for me, as it seemed to include all the dolby benefits, while adding something extra to the sound. I can't really say what happened, it just instantly sounded better to my ears. As far as the presets go, I presumed that the Dolby GUI presets were identical as the non-GUI versions (are they?), so I didn't test them at all. The Xplay preset was better than stock, but not nearly as good as the Dolby Atmos.

Basically, all of the available options were bad compared to Atmos, quite troublesome overall, and can't compare to Genesis. I experienced some sort of background hiss no matter what I applied for the duration of my listening. For instance, my standard setup includes the Normal Clarity set at 6db - with Exodus, that setting sounded like I used xHiFi and jacked it up to 12db! Even with the Clarity off, the hiss was still omnipresent. Only after flashing the Atmos GUI preset did things change, but I could still notice the hiss in the back. Upon investigating the issue a bit further, I discovered that the resampling was set to 255 in the sonophilos prop settings, so I set both of the values to 4, as the comment in the tweak suggested. That setting, in combination with Dolby Atmos, improved the sound quality noticeably and brought it much closer to the gold standard that was Genesis Atmos. IMHO, this needs to be the default setting in all prop files.

Strangely enough, the regular Dolby prop files had the resampling at 8, but the hiss was there, which leads me to believe that the difference in sound is due to the combo of resampling and Atmos processing, and not the individual values themselves. The hissing problem tells me things need to be investigated further if Exodus wants to dethrone Genesis. As far as the sound, when set up as described, there's still a slight difference compared to Genesis. If I had to describe it, it's as if the binaurial protection was turned on in Exodus by default, using some invisible setting. The difference is slight, but noticeable in vocal and bass heavy tracks, like funk and RnB. All in all, I think that the Atmos versions of Genesis and Exodus are comparable, which I'm delighted to say. I also like the granular approach to the tweaks that Exodus introduced. But if you are a Genesis user, I don't see enough reasons to switch just yet.

As for all the fellas asking about good music players, take a look at MyPlayer++ in this XDA thread. It's free, develops fairly regularly, has lots of themes, nice visual effects, and works flawlessly with Viper and this mod. It also has some more advanced features that you can read about in the thread. Most importantly for me, it's one of the very few music players out there that show embedded artwork in full resolution, no exceptions.

Cheers!