Pixel smartphone users have been able to look forward to several updates over the past few days, and the June update also arrived on time on the Pixel 6 smartphones. As has now become known, a problem has been fixed that has existed for over half a year and was very annoying for a small target group: lossless playback of music via DAC should now also be possible on the Pixel 6.
Anyone who is completely free of suffering can listen to music directly on their smartphone and may be satisfied with the result. All others, on the other hand, use external loudspeakers or some users may also use a DAC converter. This is an external device that is placed between the smartphone and the speaker. This converts the digital signal into an analog signal so that music can be played without any compression and without any loss.
Since day one, Pixel 6 users have been reporting that the hardware cannot be used or the lossless music cannot be played. There were corresponding threads in Pixel forums and in the Google Issue Tracker. Google never officially responded to this and even now the fix rolled out with the June update has not been officially announced or described. First users report that DAC use is now possible.
The advantage of DAC was lost
Because Android smartphones usually compress the audio files and send them to the DAC in this quality, the device can’t do magic and increase the quality again. So it’s usable, but you can also omit it in its current form on the Pixel 6. A DAC normally works with the raw audio data and bypasses the Android sound processing, which ensures that the smartphone has sufficient compression. Instead of high-quality 192 kHz, there was only 24/48 kHz.