Distortion due to use of equaliser

[jonr]

Anyone else noticed that using the equaliser seems to cause horrible distortion on low volume parts (especially fade-outs)?

I'm playing MP3s converted from FLAC rips of the original CDs, encoded with LAME VBR at 200-240kbps. If I leave the music settings at "Normal" on the S9, the sound is fine. If I switch to a "user" preset and make even tiny changes (+- 1dB) to the eq settings, I can hear this distortion. It sounds like when you convert the sample size down from 24 bit to 16 bit and forget to use any dithering, if you're familiar with the concept - the sound becomes almost "crunchy".

Best way to hear it is to skip to a long fade-out, and progressively turn up the volume as the song fades - the distortion appears quite quickly for me (using Shure e5c ear canal phones and the volume control that comes with them - the S9 output is just too hissy otherwise). Switch to the "normal" setting and try again and the distortion disappears.

Very disappointed in the audio quality of the S9 The output stage has far too much gain and introduces lots of hiss at sane music volumes if you use IEMs without an external volume control, and now this issue with the eq.

I'm using firmware v2.50 - interested to hear if others have this problem, and what headphones you're using.

Jon.

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