Neo Cyrus

Even if it worked it wouldn't be using the ESS Sabre DAC, it'd use the SD 820's built-in DAC/amp and sound significantly worse. On my Axon 7 enabling it works but it sounds so inferior, much the same as without it, that I use the horrendous stock player to use my phone's main DAC/amp as nothing else supports it.

That's false because they can't pick and choose the components of an SoC. It stands for System on a Chip for a reason, that's exactly what it is, the 24 bit DAC on that thing isn't magically removed. Whether or not it's active is one thing, but it's 100% there, and Poweramp sounds so different from the stock player that it wouldn't be surprising if it really is using that 24 bit DAC.

The 24 bit output you were using before with Poweramp was actually not the A7's AKM AK4490EN DAC, it was the SD 820's built-in sound processing. I guarantee if you use the garbage stock music app and listen to some lossless files with high end headphones you'll notice there is an obvious quality difference, and that's with the stock music app (or the firmware?) actually truncating any 24 bit files to 16 bit. Basically I'm saying if you really wanted to use the A7 for hi-fi sound, you're stuck using the buggy trash tier stock music app unless there's another music player which works with it now. Last I checked there was nothing but false reports and they were just using the SD 820's sound processing. The stock music player drives me insane, I'm extremely disappointed it's taking this long for Poweramp to be updated.

1 - Axon 7 A2017U. 2 - Android 6.0.1. 3 - As already posted in this thread multiple times, it has a 32 bit AKM DAC, and the audio policy file for this model has already been posted.