I'll bet the A10 killed the alien's soundstage though.. I felt the edges of it were noticably cut off with the pico (original) although it did sound pretty nice. I'm kinda scared to try another amp with it haha. Maybe cayin c5 since it really opens up soundstage width but bass could be tighter and go deeper in my opinion.
Perhaps a little, but then whenever you go tinkering with sound you win somethings and lose others, that's just the way it is. Same with EQing. Same with just using different headphones or even speakers.
I've said this before, but I own a pair of bookshelf speakers in my kitchen. The sound they omit can be quite different to what I hear in other places such as my car (which has a sub and amp) or portable rigs etc. The bass is lighter on the kitchen speakers, but because of that they actually allow for some extra details in tracks shine through. Often I can find myself going "oh! I didn't know there was that little bit of instrument playing there" etc etc. Just something very subtle hidden down deep that come through more forward etc.
Now, does that mean the kitchen speaker rig trumps my other rigs? To me of course not, if anything it sounds a bit weaker, colder and not as full. Give me what I hear in the car or portable rigs any day of the week.
And here we go now stepping into the realm of EQing, it's pros and cons, which is why I eventually left Shozy and went with the AP100, which for me gives a more satisfying music playback experience, as (at one push of a button) I can essentially change the sound signature so that from track to track I hear what I want to hear.
At one point I even considered using some kind of A/B switch experience with the Alien Shozy, through an amp, in an effort to gain more control over the sound. It goes like this;
- This song sounds best without amping
- This song sounds better with amping (A10)
- This song sounds best with amping and using it's Bass Boost feature (A10)
Once you
hear a song that to
your mind sounds better via amping or using a bass boosting feature, it's pretty hard to go back. In the back of your mind yer always thinking to yerself "you know what... you can hear this song sound better than this... what are you doing?"... and isn't that the whole point of being an 'audiophile'? To hear the songs you like sounding the best that they can be?
So yeh, if I was shuffling all on the Shozy, to hear things the best they could be, I would want some kind of switch that would toggle the signal to going between the amp or not, and then whether i switch the bass boost on or off. Basically 3 sound signatures.
But I never quite got that far, things would be getting rather bulky and hard to ferry round which defeats the purpose, the all-in-one AP100 seemed a more logical approach.
I wish Shozy, with all it's nice polished brass 'hi-fi' looking finish, actually had a couple of bass and treble knobs to play with