PSA: Poor audio quality / es8316 codec "stereo enhancement"

[haskal]

TLDR: if your pinebook pro audio sounds crappy, try:

Code:

sudo amixer sset 'DAC Stereo Enhancement' 0

I've been using my PBP for a couple months now and i was noticing what seemed like an issue with the audio quality -- lots of music sounded really badly mis-equalized compared to playing the same music on other devices with the same headphones. So i dug into the codec and kernel driver and discovered this control, "DAC Stereo Enhancement" which is some sort of codec hardware "enhancement" for the audio going through it, which is on a scale of 0-7 and was set to 5 by default. IMHO it makes the audio sound like actual garbage and i would highly recommend disabling it. I had spent a lot of time trying to figure out why my audio was sounding weird (or if it was even sounding weird at all or i was just imagining things) and this "stereo enhancement" was it.

The control appears to be persistent across boots once you set it, so running the above command once should be all that's needed.

[Darren]

Tested works..the sound is much better after the setting.

Thank you for sharing

[stozi]

Thank you so much. Huge improvement.
Was wondering why it was the same garbage on built-ins and earphones.

[qchapter1]

Thank you! Major improvement.

[pato3]

Awesome, it is so much better!!
And I always thought the audio hardware is crap.