One rare feature of Zenfone series as a flagship spec-ed smartphone is they are still retaining the 3.5 mm audio jack when a lot. But for me I will still rely on my dedicated external DAC-Amps if sound quality is what I'm aiming for.
For the last month or so I use the Zenfone 11 Ultra, one issue keeps bugging me, which is the crackling sound when playing audio on external DAC dongle. I already tried numerous dongle DAC from budget dongles like Avani ALC5686, mid-range dongles like FiiO KA13, Shanling UA3, even flagship level DAC dongles like Ibasso DC-Elite, and many more (All of them function normally on other android smartphones), all have the same issue, crackling sounds intermittently appears when doing audio playback. I even use UAPP and Hiby with proprietary driver and "exclusive USB audio access" setting on and both still display the same symptoms. The same issue is also reported by other user. The only dongles I tested which doesn't have this issue are low-powered dongle like Apple Dongle (yeah, seriously), but they are very limited in features and sound quality.
After a month of experimenting, I found that the crackling worsen (they become louder and appear more often) when I'm operating the phone (even doing simple stuff like swiping my home screen) or operating the dongle (changing volume for example). And the only phone settings I could find to lessen the chance encountering the issue are by both turning off my mobile data (or just turning on air plane mode) and set the system modes to "High Performance", even then it doesn't guarantee it, but when it "works", the crackling basically disappear.
Anyone knows how to solve this problem?
