What I've found is that where many people report a "muted" taste, that the taste is muted because the silica wick is feeding off too much of its own flavors (silica does have a flavor when exposed to heat and vaporization, just like polyfil) which can really diminish a juice or even cause a juice to taste fishy or salty. It seems a lot of people can't really pinpoint when this is happening, as the human tongue is genetically varied and some tongues can taste certain chemicals and flavors, where others can't, but I happen to be one of the people that can always taste the wicky layer when it does happen, and it always seems to correlate with a flavor that's not coming through much at all, or tastes funky.
Why this wicky flavor happens (even if someone can't taste it in particular) is because of simple bad coil builds, or sometimes if the wick isn't getting enough juice. I find that the Protanks usually wick pretty well, and wick perfectly with both a flavor wick removed and an airflow controller set to almost cutting off all of the airflow, but I find that the Kanger coils in general may have a lot of hotspots or microshorts that cause a part of the coil to pretty much heat the silica tremendously in comparison to other parts of it's surface area, really causing a layer of this flavor to come through. Other culprits could possibly be the rubber/silicone leg grommets.
I've never personally been able to avoid this extremely muted, and very wicky, flavor with the Kanger heads, and I tried about 15 of them in a row, trying all sorts of manipulations and tests. I personally just don't have much faith in coils that aren't wrapped like micro-coils as there's really all sorts of variance they can present, and a microcoil will pretty much perform unilaterally from center outward. Cisco seem to build coils in their dripping atties that are either microcoils or designed to mimick the positives of a micro coil, and I had a tremendous flavor experience with those atties, no feedoff from the wick and a full, juicy, solid taste.
Also, some juices and coil problems can cause a juice to gunk up almost instantly, like in a minute, so this can also reduce flavors completely, though this usually correlates more to a burnt (black) or lightly ashy taste to the tongue that can sense it.
There can be a lot of problems in the vaping field, and the worst news is that sometimes, these companies will put out thousands and thousands of heads that are really all just bunk, and hundreds and thousands of people will get bad heads in the process. Aspire is having this problem right now (%95 of the people who try the Aspire are getting wicky, funky, harsh tastes) and Boge had this same problem recently too. Sadly, the only true way to avoid it is investing time into trying to learn how to build your own coils in an RDA - beyond machine oil and dust in some RDA's that you have to clean out, there's really no outside factors like rubber grommets or anything that can effect the performance of an RDA - it's really just you and the coil.
