The One M8 is a brilliant smartphone, with the best sound on the market. HTC even worked with Harman Kardon to develop a custom audio signal processor for the device, but that extra functionality only shipped on the Verizon version of the phone in America. This week, XDA Developers member baadnewz has created a conversion that can add this missing audio functionality to all HTC One M8 phones.
Once installed, the conversion adds a new section to Settings, with two settings inside – Clari-Fi attempts to restore lost quality from compressed audio sources, while LiveStage provides a richer sound when you’re listening through headphones. Through the new DSP, there’s a potential to get a much improved sound.
As you might expect from such a system-level change, the Harman Kardon conversion does require root access. If you haven’t yet rooted your phone, then you’ll have to do some work to get it into this useful state. You might find this XDA Developers toolkit a good starting point if you’ve unlocked or rooted Android phones before; if you’re going it completely fresh then this guide from Cult of Android may be better.
Once you’ve got root access and a custom recovery installed, it looks like installing the conversion is pretty straight-forward; just follow the directions on the official thread. If you have attained “S-OFF” status then there’s an all-in-one package that prepares any necessary updates and then enables the conversion. Alternatively, if you don’t have “S-OFF” you can hope no updates are required and just enable the conversion immediately.
As always, there’s a small potential to irrevocably damage your device by following (or not following) the instructions linked, so be careful you understand what you’re doing before you get started and ask in the thread if you get stuck somewhere. Another thing is that this will only work with HTC One M8 devices – don’t try this with the old HTC One M7 model, or your phone will die.
Good luck everyone, and remember to pick up some nice One M8 headphones to make the most of your newfound audio fidelity!