@Wiz33, thank you for sharing your experience with headphones and also receivers, respects.
@stalepie "they'd need to do something to the sound to make it seem better than what a smartphone provides.", yeah, seems very logical to me after reading your comment, and checking the advertisement for France for hear.on sereis, thanks.
@fish1050 Yeah, I agree on partially. For example my S7 edge which is tested by gsm arena, almost dead flat excluding bass frequencies. (It lacks bass). A-35 Sony player on the other hand has better quality and realism and timing and stereo qualities compared to S7 edge but I feel like I need to use equaliser because sometimes I feel bass is a bit much in the mix. And sometimes, treble is just a bit much. This is not problem in good recordings, It will just give some flavor and fun to it, which can be good most of the time, I agree. But I have some old recordings with low fidelity or you can say badly mastered, which are already a bit treble boosted, or some compressed pop music badly mastered for too much bass, A-35 makes them worse :/
I just wish A-35 was close to S7 edge or iPhone's in terms of frequency reproduction. Person who want a bit more bass or treble can always increase from the Eq settings.
Don't get me wrong, player has good dynamics, bacground is more black than my entry level soundcards, I feel sounds come from emptiness, treble is quite boosted but never get harsh interestingly (some person said that in older pages as well), but I really wanted it to be flat out of the box. No need to be dead flat but close.
Eq on A-35 device is quite usefull (responds quite good). The Eq on the S7 edge and Sony Xperia's are quite rubish to be honest. (Except clear bass option on the Xperias which are quite useful and work without much side effect.) S7 edge(exynoss) has 7 stepts to adjust, but after 3 dB boost on any frequency switch and whole sound is muffled. A-35 has much better eq, I boosted 60Hz all the way up to test and player gave me crap ton of bass with almost zero distorsion (very good for portable audio device), and the affect on the other frequencies were minimal. Normally no one boosts one spesific switch to max on the eq, so that's not problem. But still, I think onyl 6 steps is not enough, I can't make presice adjustment to bass section :/ I decided to turn the eq off in the end.
Anyways, I will change the device's country to U (US) in the volume hack and try again. (Because some person said "Asian version of ZX100 is hars sounding", interestingly. I had changed my device's country to E (Asia) before, so may be that's why my problem is amplified.)
Edit: I have read the whole thread 100 pages when I had time, took about 3 days
