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Help Audio Output In Mono Even Though Stereo Option Selected

superponx99

superponx99

Lurker
My phone's audio output is in mono, even though I have it set to Stereo in the Hearing setting under Accessibility. It's not the headphones, because they work fine on other devices. I tried resetting system settings on the phone to no avail. To prove to myself I'm not crazy I used one of those stereo apps, and I can hear both channels in both earbuds.

I use an LG G5, with all system software up to date at the moment.

I'm just so confused because this makes no sense. I use the Stereo/Mono option all the time to switch when I'm listening to music with only one earbud in, and it's worked fine. But for some reason right now it does nothing, and all audio is stuck in mono.
 
So sounds like could be an issue or bug with the firmware then, and an update might be required to fix it, which is something LG would need to do. Could try factory resetting it, as it just might be something funky happening.
 
I got somewhat the same issue on my Oppo A54, CPH2239. Things like AIMP, YouTube and other social media stuff appear to be playing stereo audio as they should, but I had this 3rd party dual channel Function generator app that worked like a champ on all my previous devices, strangely mixing the both channels into mono. So I got a stereo tester, the same thing happened. The MIDI player app I use is sounding muddy no matter what, especially Reverb/Chorus is enabled and the instrument panning doesn't work either and this was all distracting.

So, I checked for updates and updated the OS from android 10 to 11. Fast forward, I now know that the issue has something to do with these Audio classes - AAAudio, OpenSL and AudioTrack. On my phone, AudioTrack is the only API that is able to play stereo Audio. And after the update, maybe AudioTrack has been set as the default, Otherwise I should change each app's settings explicitly to use that. Tragedy is that the majority of apps doesn't even have a proper audio class selection tool. Especially games. Games would either use AAAudio or OpenSL since the latencies are lower(?) Than AudioTrack. So now I'm missing out on any new stereo audio experience. Does this supposed to happen like so? Or is my chipset or something (MediaTek Helio P35) faulty?
 
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