I'm curious about high-resolution audio. I don't buy music anymore, I stream it from Spotify, and although Spotify (to my knowledge) does not currently offer high-resolution audio, they were testing offering lossless audio the last time I searched for information about Spotify and sound quality. Plus, I might try out Tidal. I don't know much about high-resolution audio, so I need to know what to look for in mobile devices. I've read that some people connect external DACs to their mobile devices; I hesitate to do that, because it sounds inconvenient, especially since I work out with my phone. I mean, imagine putting a phone into an armband case and going running, with the USB DAC connected. How would that work?
Still, I won't rule out a DAC if I can't get what I want built-in to the phone, especially DACs that are designed for portability (I'd probably keep it in my pocket all of the time, along with my phone) and work with Android and/or iOS.
I'm posting this to find out if anyone knows anything that I have missed. Also, I've read that Android does not support high-resolution sound; specifically, any sound that is higher than 16-bit or has a higher sample rate than 48 kHz gets converted to 16/44.1 during playback. I need confirmation of this, and if it is true, please tell me whether it is true of Android 7.x (Nougat) and of the Android 8 (O) developer preview, because the information that I came across was old.
I'm also curious about phones that can record surround sound via their internal microphones, and play it too (and while playing it over headphones or the internal speakers, virtualize the surround channels). After Googling [phones that can record surround sound], I found out about Lumia phones with "rich recording". As far as I understand, they are able to record and encode Dolby Surround sound. Unfortunately, they are Windows phones, and as a current Windows Phone user (technically, Windows 10 Mobile) I am planning on switching to either Android or iOS due to the app gap between Windows Phone/Mobile and the other two phone OSes.
In addition, I Googled [phones with Dolby Audio Capture] (that's Dolby's latest tech for recording 5.1-channel sound) and found some phones that can record 5.1-channel Dolby Digital Plus, and also support virtual Dolby Atmos over headphones (and maybe even over the built-in speakers, IIRC).
So, I'm curious about:
1. phones that support high-resolution sound
2. Phones that can both record and play surround sound (and when they play it, they should be able to virtualize the surround and center channels over headphones).
I'm posting this to find out if anyone knows anything that I have missed. Especially about high-resolution audio, as I know little- to nothing about high-resolution audio.
If I am missing any information that would help me with anything I've mentioned, please let me know.