Android Smartphone Qualcomm DAC Sound Quality Hack : Part 1

Peculiarly, the manufacturers sell under-optimized or outdated coding resulting lower quality sound. This is an introductory article on tweaking Android acoustics. We need to hack to enable all the hardware features of Qualcomm 420 and above. Here is Part 1 of Android Smartphone Qualcomm DAC Sound Quality Hack. If you are fully newbie, you should read our few older article including SoC, Latest Smartphone GPU Technologies, smartphone vs dedicated music player, headphone vs earphone and earbud vs in-ear to make sure that you are not missing any basic matters.

A China company manufacturers Vivo, Oppo, OnePlus etc brands. Those phones including Vivo Y71 uses custom OS with lot of tweaks for sound. However, we can tweak them more to test various things including Dolby Atmos.

Tools For Android Smartphone Qualcomm DAC Sound Quality Hack

Snapdragon Android device has a DAC named as Wcd9xx. It is configurable for some options. We can Enable/Disable and modify some options. Manufacturers usually do not tweak Wcd9xx audio DAC to use full potential. This prevents to get some better sound quality.

For example, we have DAC Enabler which is a module which can be flashed using the Magisk tool. For this, we need
Magisk v11.0+ and BusyBox. Magisk manager has own website :

There are many humans who fear to root their devices. Magisk manager avoids rooting and give a kind of super user mode. Again – DAC Enabler is a module of that Magisk. BusyBox available via Google Play store. Android Terminal apps like Termux does offer normal way of viewing files.

We can also install Dolby Atmos on any Android, even without Root. There are more tweaks like Viper4Android which does not need Android to be rooted. We need TWRP custom recovery on device, take a full backup with TWRP recovery of device, download the zip files of them and follow the instructions of each.

There is separate APK (and also Magisk module) to make SELinux permissive. It is very useful. On servers we work with SELinux permissive or disabled.

We hope this article delivered a basic idea to research on the matter.