One of the features I particularly loved on walkman of the late 80’s and onwards was Mega Bass! While i used my DD33 on a daily basis, i found myself missing the loud thumps and booms when i used my WM-3. I initially sought out an SEQ-50, one of those portable equalizers, but after seeing the price of the listings across different auction sites i got turned off pretty quick, not to mention the size. I looked for more modern amps and found that despite being “portable” they were still fairly large and cumbersome. I stumbled upon the DigiZoid Z02 and subsequent later models, however the Z02 seems to have been erased from existence and the later models were expensive. Finally i happened upon the minuscule FiiO A1. It was small and had the Bass EQ i was looking for. What really sealed the deal was the fact it was only $30?! And importantly a small belt clip. I quickly realized that i could maintain the *relatively* small form factor of my on-the-road setup by attaching the amp/eq to the belt loop on the back of the Walkmans case. Nothing fancy, but i must say im pretty proud of my little combo i got going. Now a little about the FiiO, it can drive headphones up to 100 ohms and has 3 bass options. The first is a bass boost of around 2.6 decibels, the second is around 5.2 however cuts a bit off the top end. (good for dolby encoded tapes) The third is weird, reducing the bass by 5.2 decibels, the only application i imagine this could be useful on is for people with cheap low quality crazy bass heavy headphones. Now the bass on the FiiO isnt Mega Bass by any means, for starters it seems to really shine on the very low end, Mega Bass in comparison dominating the Mid-Bass region.
