16GB SONY E series walkman sucks

Hello I never thought I'd be writing a negative review of a SONY product I love everything SONY but the new E series walkmans are suplendiferus NOT!.:wave

http://www.sony.co.uk/product/nws-e-series/nwz-e445

Solid feel,well laid out,super cool looking but who cares about that right?I don't.The sound quality has taken a step backwards from the S series of which I owned-

http://www.sony.co.uk/product/nws-s-series/nwz-s638f

For start the headphones are terrible they sound like some tinny cheap rubbish from a bargain store and have no power at all,especially no Bass but this fine I still have the ones for the S series so I hooked them up which increases volume and Bass by around 20% and this brings me to my main grievance

THE VOLUME

I hope SONY can see that in Japan :-D The volume is terribly low easily 20-30% lower than the S Series,its actually lower than my SONY mini disc player 10 years its junior and yes I've turned off auto volume limiting,turned on and off dynamic normaliser which regulates the volume between track,turned the bass up,listened to tracks encoded at max volume,encoded some files myself at max volume and tried those which helps a little but which not the point I'm not re-encoding my 50 gig music collection just for 'A little' extra volume,jacked up all the frequencies in the equaliser, yada ,yada ,yada

Now I am slightly bias I like my music loud,I ramp it up till my ears hurt and people start bobbing their head as I walk past them then I ramp it up two notches more but this isn't the problem,the problem is if I'm walking down the street and a car passes I can hardly hear the music.

And I'm not the only one I knew this was a problem after reading many a review but I thought as you may that this was a setting problem its isn't,I'm a geek there isn't menu system in the land that can hide a secret setting from me.

So my final thoughts are to avoid unless your Steve Austins offspring and the gov has spent more than six million dollars fitting two bionic ears rather than one.

If you still want one pick one of these up first start your music playing and point this toward it

http://www.lin-technologies.com/ICE/Bionic%20Ear%20&%20Booster.jpg