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Does anyone have the service manual for the NWZ-S series? I am guessing it would be mostly identical to the NWZ-A series.

Actually I retested the NWZ-S616 and determined it does have a perfectly flat frequency response, my test was botched up due to a bad cable. While the NW-A1000 test was done a long time ago when the cable was not damaged. The NWZ-S616 does infact have a flat response. At least in my test. So I personally think it's an excellent player. I will re-test it tonite on another machine to verify and post the results if I don't forget

True about sound, it depends on taste. I would be very hard pressed to believe that the A818 and S616 differ a lot internally. It is expensive to develop these players and logically sony would wish to change as little as possible to save on development costs. I've played with the NWZ-A816 in a store and I have to say it's in every way identical menu wise to my S616 except a much nicer slimmer body. I think the S616 is a better unit overall. The NWZ-A816 lacked the (useless) FM Tuner. And even though it's screen is a little larger I think it's a backlit TFT lcd which looks worse to my eye then the S616's OLED display. The TFT might have advantage of being more visible in bright sunlight if it's a transflective TFT. Anyway, I think the S6xx series is actually superior to the A8xx series feature wise. I will get a chance to audition the A8xx series soon I hope to compare the sound.

What headphones are you using with the NW-A1000? I use Shure E4C and Ety ER4P. I find NW-A1000 is just smoother sounding not muted. The S616 is somewhat harsher sounding. I think you might simply be mistaking smoothness for muteness due headphones.

I found out my cable was damaged. I've retested the NWZ-S616F yesterday and it had a perfectly flat response so there is no problem. I have also tested it while driving 16ohm headphones and like all other sony players it didn't falter. No bass roll off what so ever. So again another excellent sounding device from Sony. Overall it sounds quite good but I still think my old NW-A1000 sounds more refined. It sounds smoother and a bit more refined. In my mind NW-A1000 has a higher class audio output chain then the NWZ-S616F. The NW-A1000 had a Burr Brown (now ti) PCM1772 DAC which has inherited the typical relaxed smooth and refined BB sound. The NWZ-S616F most likely has the same output chain as the NW-A800 series. Which is the Cirrus Logic CS42L51-CNZR. That chip is also quite good but to my ears it doesn't sound as refined as the PCM1772 in the NW-A1000. I use Shure E4C and Ety ER4P with my players.

I just picked up a NWZ-S616F. I decided to test in in RMAA to see if its audio performance to the standard of my old NW-A1000 (that is still my main player). I get rather strange results in RMAA. It looks like the player has some sort of permanent EQ on. I turned off all DSP settings and set EQ to normal before my test (and then rechecked everything again to make sure it's all DSP stuff is off). Anyway the S616 appears to have a rather large rise in the low frequencies and a rather large rise in high frequencies. I.e. I could not get a flat frequency response from it! If anyone is able please test your NWZ-S616 in RMAA and see if you can get a flat response from it? Remember RMAA software is free, to test you just need a loopback cable (you probably have such with your pc speakers it has 2 male headphone connectors on both ends) and then you can test. If you want to test your player for sound quality download http://audio.rightmark.org/index_new.shtml and test. Anyway I would love to see results for the NWZ-S616 and NWZ-A816.