Did you get an answer?I'm concerned about the "U's". They dropped the earphone port for the USB C. I just asked 1More if they will be making an adapter for the USB C ports and which will the new Quad Driver have. If HTC changes the earphone setup, they've lost me. It can't be done automatically.
This concerns me too. The problem for me is that while in principle you can put a DAC in the phone and output analogue audio via USB-C for those who want, my guess is that HTC will go digital only with an adapter containing a DAC and amp for those wishing to use existing headphones (seems to be the case for the Bolt). In which case the question isn't the audio capabilities of the phone but how good the components in the dongle are, and obviously nobody except those who understand this will want it to be anything other than cheap.
So as someone who cares about audio quality, isn't going to replace their headphones, and whose phone is getting old, I worry that if the mid-2017 flagship sticks to HTC's recent trend I'm going to have to choose between buying a 10 (with half of its software update lifetime gone) or an LG G6 (who do seem to be emphasising audio capabilities).