The zen touch is very odd because it sounds completely different depending on the headphone/earphone being used. With my sony d66 eggo it sounds very thin and bright; with my ER6i the mids are too congested with rolled off treble
, but hooked up to my hi-fi speakers it sounds better than any portable player I've heard. This is all without any EQ; the custom EQ is actually faulty on the earlier firmware versions.
You might want to try the latest firmware (2.11.01) because that seems to have fixed the firmware bugs and bass distortion, but its still not perfect. For example, the 12khz bar doesn't seem to do very much eventough its supposed to be +/- 12dB and the 100hz does very little to counter the zens anaemic bass. That said with the setting +6,0,0,+2 the D66s do sound fairly warm without sacrificing too much quality. Here are the various firmwares in order which can be found on the creative website,
1.00.06 ~ The original firmware, which has a few GUI issues but otherwise works fine. The custom EQ sounds the cleanest on this firmware, but sounds thin in the bass department and distorts if 100hz bar is put too high. The EQ presets sound different to the other firmware but with the EQ turned off, it sounds the same.
1.01.03 ~ Avoid at all costs! Fixes some issues but totally destroys the custom EQ and changes the sound for the worst.
2.10.05 ~ Adds windows "Play For Sure" MTP support meaning with windows-xp sp1/sp2 and WMP10 you can access the player without any additional drivers or software and you can also listen to subscribtion based music downloads on you zen. BUT....the EQ is still faulty with this firmware!
2.11.01 ~ Fixes the EQ bugs and some other issues.
FW 1.00.06 is not available on the creative website but can be downloaded
here . Also note that when you update to FW 2.10.05 all your music is deleted and you can't revert back to earlier firmware. To update to FW 2.11.01 you need FW 2.10.05 first.