I tried this and it seems to mostly work functionality wise.
However the speaker appears to sounds different and noticeably worse

example of pre-2025.5 HERE
example of 2025.5 with this change HERE

I am not sure what causes this issue but probably should be addressed.
I initially thought my speaker might have gone bad but have gone back and forth and its definitely a change that comes with 2025.5 and/or this config.

I tried this and it seems to mostly work functionality wise. However the speaker appears to sounds different and noticeably worse

example of pre-2025.5 HERE example of 2025.5 with this change HERE

I am not sure what causes this issue but probably should be addressed. I initially thought my speaker might have gone bad but have gone back and forth and its definitely a change that comes with 2025.5 and/or this config.

Are you building with ESPHome 2025.5.0 or an older dev branch? I did encounter this issue when testing it initially, but esphome/esphome#8738 fixed it for me.

Are you building with ESPHome 2025.5.0 or an older dev branch? I did encounter this issue when testing it initially, but esphome/esphome#8738 fixed it for me.

definitely building with 2025.5. just tried clearing the build files and recompiling and still have the issue.

Changing the channels to stereo seems to consistently fix the audio quality issues. Using the previous settings would occasionally have good quality if you constantly restarted playing an audio file. I'm guessing there is some issue with how the new IDF5 driver handles mono audio. We do swap every other sample like the documentation says, but I don't believe that consistently fixes it.