Music quality in the Blade - isolated issue?

[Guest Cyanide911]

So basically my old android died and I'm on a friend's Dell XCD35 (ZTE Blade) Gen2 now. I tried to listen to music with it with my brand new headphones, and the sound quality is really disappointing :(

Can this be something related to the stock ROM i.e. can something like this be fixed by a custom ROM? Because I've never noticed a huge difference in music performance across android devices, and the music in this Blade isn't up to the mark at all. Is there a ROM specializing in music (with something like Beats and xLoud) which might fix this? Or is the Blade known to have not-so-good sound quality?

Edited July 27, 2012 by Cyanide911

[Guest hydo1]

I think that the audio hardware that is inside the blade is fairly cheap (after all it is a cheap phone) this means that you can hear a hissing sound when music goes quiet and also for me it has never sounded that great.

I must say that Orange's stock ROM that came with my San Fran was dire and audio quality was equally poor, upgrading to cyanogenmod did make a difference because you can tweak the sound with DSP Manager.

I believe that Burstlam's ICS used to have Beats but it made no difference so he removed it shortly after adding it. Basically give another ROM a go and see if you can see any difference.