On Friday, a friend and I decided to go all the way down to 112 Katong and audition the Aurisonics Generic AS-1. I read up on it beforehand, and I was pretty impressed by the specs (15mm dynamic driver!!), the design and the reviews that I found on Head-Fi. Similarly, my hard-to-impress friend was interested in trying out too.
I first tried it without an amp, straight out from my iPod Nano. Instantly, I was baffled by the sound I was hearing. It was so.... muffled that I couldn't believe it was coming from a S$350 earphones. My Soundmagic PL30, priced below S$50, sounds better than this! I then tried it with the O2 amp and although the sound cleared up a little, it was still really really muffled. I passed it over to my friend without a comment (no expectation bias) and after he tried it, he kinda agreed with me that the AS-1 was really really bad. There were no good points at all: The highs, mids, bass, soundstage... Nothing was good. (Btw, I was using the JVC FXT90, and my friend was using the Futuresonics Atrios, so our ears were pretty used to low to mid tier earphones. The AS-1 is about twice the price of the JVC FXT90.)
So... all in all, a vastly disappointing audition. Generally, with a bigger driver, you will come to expect a better sound, and in this case, the sound is much worse than other dynamic drivers earphones with smaller drivers. Incidently, my FXT90 has 2 dynamic drivers and the Atrios has a dynamic driver too. In this short dynamic earphones shootout, size really doesn't matters.
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