So much has already been said about Atom's volume pot imbalance, and I expected it to be a long solved problem. But unfortunately the unit I received around the New Year still suffers from this issue.
From what I can hear, the imbalance is kept within the given specs, that is, it doesn't seem to exceed 0.6 dB. But I honestly didn't expect it to be this noticeable. I must admit, it doesn't bother me much while I'm listening to music (in fact, it took me about a month to discover it), but it's quite obvious with mono audio like speech in YouTube videos. The balance is off to the left throughout the lower half of the pot, up until around 12 o'clock; after that it gets negligible. I added a -0.4 dB gain to the left channel in Equalizer APO with the intention of finding some middle ground where it's not noticeable either way, but it's still not quite perfect.
I'm somewhat disappointed with this situation, since in every other regard Atom is pretty much flawless. I don't even mind the plastic case; if anything, I'd say it looks pretty sleek. But the channel imbalance is like the single audible thing that Atom failed to get right. This seems ironic, given that we all pick it for perfect performance across the board, even though most of its measurements are far below any audibility thresholds (which is still an impressive feat, nonetheless).
