[OnePlus 3 ROMs, Kernels, Recoveries, & Other Devel] Ashtrix:
I'm quoting myself on against this..^

I always wanted to buy a HTC device, I missed M7 (The volume rocker on this is perfection, finest and superb idea just stays flush and the finish is top with Unibody and metal grill over speakers too), M8 both but used them for a few days that's all never got to mod them out, M8 tho I unlocked it, were friends units. And with 10 It was lacking the bigger screen and the eMMC chip both were dealbreaker to me, But now I realize how badly I miss the DAC, Headphone AMP - Audio of the HTC 10, They have the best Audio implementation from what I read, beats the ESS on laptops too and V20. But now looking at the future of HTC stance on the 3.5mm analog port It's such a bummer.

- 2 degrees of port freedom vs 360 on the analog.

- Clean sound from the choice of your High End (Hi-Res or not) headphones, adding an extra DAC in the headphones wire makes the IEM/Headphone not to cater to most (I use a hybrid triple driver IEM here ) because it defeats the purpose of adding / stacking them across different DACs and AMPs aftermarket.

- The substantial benefit of removing the jack by adding Sonar and ANC is not that ground shattering, Sony does it with DNC already (They even ship with "True" Stereo, a.k.a front facing speakers), Plus the board space thing isn't valid at all, the PCB are very complex and be adhered as per the OEMs designs, Look at the MXM GPUs on Pascal and Maxwell over 100W TDP designs.

- Finally the availability of the USB C Audio doesn't exist and I don't think it'll become a norm due to the above reason - Incl the DAC inside the wire will add cost for us and their compatibility over massive products plus high end audio gear companies don't see this as future (IDE is old replaced by SATA this is not the case here), only gimmick was from Audeze with their over-zealous iSines that too for the Lightning, Plus using USB C on a machine is making the TB3 interface sacrificed to an audio port (Yeah this is in future), Apple did it for MFi (cash - Look at the latest Trashbook Pros full dongleyfe), It's a fact but tbh no idea why the best Audio engineers in the mobile spectrum (HTC) did this mistake. Even Lenovo/MotoZ2 brought it back & If you didn't know they were the first to drop this before Apple...

- Squeeze feature will be most likely limited to the HTC Sense, Super glossy glass finish (no qi charging still, Perhaps they wanted to save cash on Metal milling) fragility vs the Rigid solid 10's Metal built & no Stereo, Loved that M7 a lot, still do - that Electrifying Blue color is dope..U Ultra was a greatest mistake this seems a repeat to me, Hope the Pixel 2 stays strong.

Now the DAC solution in the USonic earphones & the Adapter how better or worse are those compared to the HTC 10's Implementation ?

No body cares about Audio nowadays, look at Samsung they bought the Harman Kardon they don't even ship anything special except for that gimmick sauce edge moniker and 2:1 bad ratio but those AKG buds are pathetic, I tried them not even comparable to the RHA MA750s or Dunu Titan 1 or FiiO EX1 - my iPod 5.5G and my SGS (Voodoo hacked for better control over the HW DAC/AMP) both are Wolfson powered and they just steamroll every machine I came across.

Irony is a few chinese OEMs do care (No wonder when we have good Audio gear from them - Dunu, OPPO HA2-SE, FiiO E17K) likes of Xiaomi, ZTE & LeEco, Lenovo, Vivo, Meizu they only use "dedicated audio" chips in single/dual/triple configs and Amps from ESS, AKM & Cirrus Logic.. The HTCU11 ships with a DAC inside that uSonic set or the 3.5mm port with DAC inside it, No idea on the AMP part plus iirc the battery drain will happen if you keep it plugged into the device..Qcom Aqustic is nothing it's just bland and poor vs these, that's why people depend on the Software DSP solutions (Arise, v4a, Dolby dsps, but yeah EQing is needed for any powerful HW tho) which will make the battery tank due to the CPU dependency. Also the AptX HD is not a lossless codec, LDAC is the only one which is close to that but also it's with CD quality not the 24Bit/96, Too much loss for a simple analog audio port just because of the mainstream (Cough *Apple* *crApple* Cough). Finally further more control over the I/O it leaves them options to restrict the licenses / drm etc (why not ? -> Look at UEFI and compare it with the Microsoft's UEFI Class III, Secure Flash) , like bass pay to apple for that extra feature & Massive fragmentation of the audio industry.

Flar2 Very Sorry for the OT & rant..