Got a pair of these for $70 used on CL so I gave them a shot. The guy said he used them for about 40 hours, and I've got another 15 or so on them thus far. Most of the listening has been done on my computer, running whatever onboard sound comes with the nForce4 chipset through a 280W Onkyo home theatre amp from the 80s. I initially ran them through my receiver, but got zero bass out of them that way for some reason.
For studio headphones that retail at $200, I was expecting more. They didn't sound $180 better than the junk headphones I'd been using before. A lot of that impression likely came from the receiver they were plugged into – I was getting zero bass out of them and didn't understand where the reviews of them having decent bass were coming from. I plugged them into my Sansa and got better bass out of it than I was getting out to the receiver. It puts decent bass through the speakers plugged into it, which alerted me to the problem. I have no idea why I'm not getting bass out of the old stereo receiver. I get decently punchy bass out of the Onkyo amplifier.
For construction these are well built. They fit comfortably over my ears which has been a challenge with some headphones in the past. The metal headband seems extremely durable, I doubt anyone could break it without trying. The padding under it should alleviate any pain caused by the metal.
I primarily listen to eurobeat, trance, power metal and rock so have spent most of my listening to those. For the most part my preference for using these phones for those genres of music goes in that order as well. They do pretty well with eurobeat and do best when there is a strong contrast between the bass and treble; anything from E-Rotic demonstrates this quite well. Male vocals are especially pronounced and sound quite good. Teddy Boy and Dave Rodgers sound much better than they should. There can be problems with female vocals though. Cherry/Vanessa/Terry Gordon/Clara Moroni's 10,000 other aliases really tends to get drowned out if you don't go out of your way to reduce the bass. On the trance side Groove Coverage sounds very good on these, and the vocals do not get drown out the way Moroni's do.
One thing I found surprising is that “My Immortal” by Evanescence sounds heinously anus. I don't know to describe it in audiophile, but it's the same kind of awful sound that cheap car speakers make when they're blown. I put the CD in my Pioneer Laserative, plugged the phones directly into it and got the same thing. There is a similar effect at the beginning of the Sonata Arctica version of “Still Loving You” although it is not as pronounced. The bass in “Awake and Alive” by Skillet is highly muddled, but “Monster” from the same album with considerably more bass isn't nearly as muddled, but still enough for me to complain about. Perhaps these issues will go away as I use the headphones more. They require anywhere from 0-100 hours burn in, based on what I've read here.
To really push my nerdorm, the DJ Finish Him remix of the Phantasy Star theme sounds a million times better than it has any right to, and the bass does not get muddled in the least bit, despite being much lower than songs these phones had issues with.
My rap listening is pretty minimal, just a few tracks for nostalgia purposes. The few Eminem, Dre and 2Pac songs I put through these sounded fine. Nothing overly muddled or overly punchy, it was just kinda there. "Baby Got Back" and "Ninja Rap" OTOH sounded great.
I'll be happy with these for the money if they don't crap out in a year like every other pair of headphones I've owned. Assuming they last I'll likely be satisfied with them in the long run. They sound a lot better than everything I demoed at Best Buy and Radio Shack. As long as they're $90 new on eBay it seems like the best deal going for now.
