I realize there have been threads about this already but they are a couple of years old, and my question is slightly different. If you don't want to read the wall of text (understandable), skip to the last paragraph.
I have the sansa clip (v1) which I have rockbox'd. The stock buds sounded ok to me. I bought some sony Mdr ex-700's from ebay (which I thought were real) but they sounded a lot better since they were in ear. They unsurprisingly ended up breaking which led me to my next earphone (my biggest mistake). It was a panasonic hje-something. Really cheap and the audio quality showed. After that mistake I decided I would spend some proper money on some good in-ears, which after much research I ended up getting the soundmagic e10's (which received very positive reviews from everywhere).
I plugged them into my clip and was quite underwhelmed. It did sound better than the panasonics but not miles better. After all the reviews I thought these phones would blow me away but they didn't. I messed around with the EQ's but to no avail, it only made things worse. I thought It might be the earphones. The impact from the bass was underwhelming and the songs generally didn't have much energy. I tried the e10's in my cousins HTC XE (w/beats (shudder)). The phones suddenly came alive. Although it was bass heavy, it sounded amazing. It felt like a mini subwoofer.
Today I plugged the phones into the line out of some crappy trust speakers, which I connected to the lineout of the onboard sound from my pc. Tried the same songs through winamp/foobar and the phones sounded brilliant. Really came to life. Bass was tight, had plenty of impact, vocals were strong, musical separation was great and soundstage notably bigger. The problem that I thought were the e10's were actually the clip. Everyone keeps saying the clip has very good SQ so why doesn't it work well with the e10's? Does it need an amp to drive the phones? or is the clip itself the problem?
Edited by RayleighSilvers - 1/12/12 at 8:25pm
