Sound quality deteriorates after several minutes

[miv]

Using an LG V35, hooked up to an Icepower 50asx2 in a generic box, playing mostly flac files, from an sd card. Quad DAC is on.

For the first few minutes of listening (on Neutron Player), it sounds better than either the Centrance Dacport slim or Audioengine D1 Dacs plugged into my trusty old thinkpad. After maybe 5 minutes, I can hear the sound start to deteriorate - getting thin and gritty. The change doesn't happen all at once, but it happens fast enough that I can sense it happening....

I'm assuming it's something happening in the phone, rather than the amp, since..well, since I imagine anything that happened to the amp would involve permanent damage. Don't think it can be too high an output, in any event, since the amp doesn't have a volume control, and I'm playing music at a reasonable level while I work (if you see what I mean : sound level is only controlled by the device feeding current to the amp, and if volume is the same as it is from the laptop and dac...) .... And too high output impedance (it's an issue with icepower amps) at the phone end would affect sound from the start and not in this way...

I can't seem to make it happen using the LG's own music player, so I don't think it's a hardware issue - but things sound better using Neutron..... So I'm hoping for some advice about what settings I can I play with to try to fix it. It seems to happen more quickly if I turn on the EQ and/or AGP.

Finally, it might happen faster the higher the resolution of the music being streamed....not sure because that info isn't displayed in any way obvious to me when I'm using Neutron, but I have a fair number of higher-resolution FLACs saved on the card.

Don't really want to go back the the Thinkpad and DAC, as the laptop is dealing with some seemingly insurmountable latency issues, with enough dropouts to ruin the experience...so if anyone has any suggestions, I'd be hugely grateful....

[blaubär]

Perhaps the operating system tries to save power and limits the ressources that it allots to the Neutron app ? Could you check that - might be called optimization, power saving, etc ...

[miv]

An excellent idea - as I always have the phone set to maximum "battery saver". I'll try with battery saver turned off and report back here if it makes a difference. If it doesn't, I'll poke around and see if there are any other power- or battery-related settings.

[Branch80]

I suggest going to settings, scrolling to the bottom, and enabling:

Service - Keep process running in background

This should help keep your player running optimally regardless of phone's battery saving mode or other processes that could affect playback.