The excellent commentary on this form led to my purchase of an E10 and ATH-M50s recently, and I couldn't be happier with the sound quality from the pair especially with my 24/96 collection. The response is very flat and the noise floor is nearly nonexistent!
There is one problem, though, which I have not seen mentioned in this thread. I have very sensitive hearing; the last time I had it checked I had zero hearing loss out past 20kHz. So I tend to listen to music at very low levels (<30dB SPL, about as loud as a whisper or less). I have noticed on the E10 that the channel balance is heavily biased to the left until the volume knob gets past the 0.75 mark (E10 goes up to 8), and I would like to listen around the 0.5 mark for a portion of my regular CD collection. Is this occurring for other E10 owners as well or is mine defective? As a side note I ave noticed this same behavior on many (if not most) low and mid-end amplifiers over the years, exceptions being my Rotel RA-02 and other similar and better quality amplifiers.
I suppose I could put a resistor or similar in the path of the headphones, allowing me to turn the volume knob past 1 and still get a low volume in the headphones. Has anyone done this?
Oh, and the gain is set to low on the E10.
Thanks!