[Xperia Z3 General] barkohba:
I have e few objections regarding your long post. Mainly about audio.

Keep in mind that I'm an audiophile, meaning that what I aim to achieve with an audio setup is the clearest, non artificial, full (emphasis on soundstage) sound I can get, basically as close to what the artist intended.

First, a bit of talk about my setup. Before getting my Z3, I owned a Z1, coupled with a Sony MDR 1R headset and , just like what you have, a Fiio E11K headphone AMP. I got the MDR 1R after testing them out against other similarly priced headsets. My alternatives were Sennheiser Momentum and AKG K550 (note, I have tested many others but in the end it came down to these 3). While all are great headphones, I chose the MDR 1R because it was better than the alternatives in 3 key features, which matter to me: better soundstage, better sub bass (both courtesy of the 4hz-80khz frequency response) and much, much more comfortable, considering I use them 8 hours a day at work.

I then proceeded to buy the Fiio E11k (after looking and documenting about a good headphone amp for maximum 100 $) due to the fact that the 1R are a 48ohm headset, and an extra bump in volume and mid bass. The combination was OK, but I realised when using the 1Rs with dedicated non portable headphone amps/dac, like Woo Audio ones, the difference was beyond night and day than what the little E11k could offer (granted, the difference in price is astronomical). I knew the Z1 is in no way a fantastic music player (good one, but not great), and i didn't want to invest a minimum of 300 dollars on a portable DAC. I just waited for the z3.

When I got the Z3, I also changed my headsets. I got the MDR 1A, replacing my older 1R, because they basically improved and repaired everything that was wrong with the 1R (which were an excellent headset to begin with), and then some. Won't get into detail, but they are, I would venture to say, miles better than the 1R, especially in the bass department and the fact that they're 24ohms (half of what the 1Rs are, much easier to drive without an amp)

Anyway, now having an excellent high res music player (z3), and arguably the best headphones you can find in their price range (300 dollars) and even above, I can tell you the following:

1) FiioE11k - it's useless as far as sound quality goes (and it woudl have been useless on the 1R together with the Z3, and with any other high end headset for that matter). Sure, they'll bump up your volume and give you a bass improvement if you really need it, but the problem is the Z3 is capable of decoding FLACS of up to 24 bit, which means it could reproduce frequencies of as low as 3hz and as high as 80-90khz (and high res headphones like the MDR 1A can reproduce in the range of 3hz-100khz). I'm not here to get in the debate about human hearing, because that's not the point of high res, but the soundstage is what matters. See, the fiioe11k is still a (very) budget amp, good for mid range headsets, and when you plug your headsets in, it cuts the frequency response to a measly 20hz-20khz, which kills the soundstage, and it even sounds muddier on high end headphones (including your sennheiser). So if it's that high res quality you're after, dump the Fiio.

As far as volume is concerned, I'm absolutely delighted with these extremely accurate high quality, low ohm MDR 1A, because they really bump at near high volume, and they have excellent bass response. If however you are not satisfied with the max volume wait a couple of months till someone roots the Z3 WITHOUT unlocking the bootloader, hit me up, and i'll be happy to show you how to get a 30% volume boost by unlocking the software volume limit that all sony phones have set into the root.

2) Sound enhancements/eq, etc :

Here, I'll talk about each sound options you have in the Walkman and what to use and what not to use in order to get the best sound possible when it comes to clearness, natural sounding voice and soundstage. I'll also talk a bit about PA.

a) Clear Audio + -> I don't know why anyone would use this. What it seems to do is actively change the EQ by spiking certain frequencies during a song, which is horrible, disabling the DSEE HX , and setting the "Surround sound" setting, which is absolute BULL**** , to Studio. It seems to be marginally helpful when used with ****ty headsets such as the ones included. Basically: NEVER USE IT!!

b) EQ -> an equalizer when used correctly. In order to use it correctly you need to know 2 things: Your headsets's native frequency response, in order to compensate and the fact that you only adjust it slightly. Now the Walkman EQ is probably the best one available on a mobile device period. It never lets you damage and distort the sound no matter how high you set it, and the adjustment follow a natural trend, never sounding ridiculous even when messing with it really bad and setting everything to the max (which is a retarded thing to do, would never help at anything, but I tried it just to prove a point). Knowing your headphone frequency response is crucial, the MDR1A has a slight dip in the highs, for example, with an emphasis on bass, so i leave everything (bass included, of course) at neutral, but only slightly bump the last 3 high frequencies gradually from 1 to 3 +. The bass in my case, on the 1A, is very tight and present due to the aluminium coated drivers, so pushing the lows ("clear bass") higher make it too bassy.

c)"Surround Sound" - this is as bat as Clear Audio, TRUST ME, especially if you have good headsets. Off is excellent. The second you change it to anything, it kills the soundstage together with the L-R separation, creating a fake salad of a sound where you can never tell where the sounds come from (can't tell instruments apart, and certain sounds, it is basically horrible if you listen to both acoustic and instrument drive music, to expansive elctronic music like house, trance, and more). Again, if you want to value and appreciate the details of high res files combined with high res headphones, don't use it. If you do, you might as well listen to a low res file, it's bad.

d) DSEE HX -> now here's indeed a very usefull funciton. Dsee Hx is basically an upscaling mechanism. It takes anything that is below 24 bit Flacs, and fills up the remaining frequencies. Now, of course this means nothing unless it fills them up intelligently, and it really really does. Especially on 320kbs mp3s, which are the most common type of file you can find, there's a huge difference, expecially in areas of the song/file where the high, mid, an low (or any combination of low+high/mid) sounds overlap. Normally it becomes a rather mushy sound where both the lows and the mid/highs get recessed for a few seconds. But when the DSEE HX is set on, it fills those frequency bridges that connect the lows to the mids and highs very nicely, keeping a constant full sound. Very good feature, USE IT, though it wll eat battery 10% faster, which makes sense.

e) Virtual surround sound (for speakers): Firstly, this is a feature that only affects the speakers. So many don't care about it. But if you do tend to use the external speakers quite often for, whatever reason, a true and quality sound comes when you DON't use it. Using it basically phases between the left and right speaker really fast, creating a fake surround sound. The results vary from little difference to the loss of a lot of detail if you listen to music, making it sound very unnatural.

f)Dynamic normalizer: it has nothing to do with boosting anything, just so we're clear. It minimizes the difference in volume between songs, i case you have a playlist with differently ripped/encoded files. Shouldn't be used unless you have really quiet files followed up by really loud, distorted ones.

Screen white balance: With these settings (the ones you provided) my screen at least looks like crap, but then again there must be a difference between yours and mine. I use blue 0 green&red 80 to get a slightly yellowish tint, as close to the iphone 6 plus setup as possible, which undeniably has the most natural color setup available right now.

Camera: As of now, SuperiorAuto+ is decent but still has the tendency to sometimes badly overexpose. I did a testing with an iphone 6 plus on a demanding setup: indoor lightly lit photo (with no flash, obviously) . With superior auto, the pictures were too overblown and lost some detail in comparison to the iphone. But after playing around, I found the (almost) perfect combination for most situations. When taking the same picture in manual, 8mp, stabilizer on, exposure recessed 2 levels, no scene, no flash, the picture came out perfectly exposed, and to my surprise, with clearly better (more close to what we could see with our eyes) colors and a fair bit more detail. It basically blew the iphone photo away. Which I REALLY wasn't expecting, nor did my friend, who was sure the iphone 6 will be at least slightly better. Good Job for the camera, sony, bad job on how SuperiorAuto+ overexposes most pictures.

now about PowerAmp. I tried it, it's good, not as good as walkman for the simple reason that if you play around with the EQ, it doesn't have the non distortion limits the Walkman has, and you can mess up the sound if you play to much with it, and moreover, DSEE HX seems to disable itself, which is a huge minus unless all your files are 24 bit high res FLACs.