I can understand your reservations. But I think there's more to it than that. I have some experience in recording (and being recorded) and have owned and used many loudspeaker and sound reinforcement systems professionally and domestically. I've monitored and mastered using near-field speaker systems and headphones. I enjoyed a loudspeaker system at home for many years, cycling through many different kinds of driver arrangements and amping. The main difficulty with classical music and home systems, as I'm sure you know, is the room itself, but also the major problem of providing enough power to control the driver properly. In my view that generally can't be done adequately with domestic systems (at least without spending a great deal and accommodating hefty amplification). A major advantage with phones is the reduced power requirement and better control of the driver. Another is control of the driver housing (the virtual 'room'). Phones are capable of delivering greater fidelity than loudspeakers in my experience. Even so, there's a big problem I think in achieving any kind of realism with phones. They generally don't present recorded information in the way it was meant to be presented. That can be addressed with binaural recording or crossfeed. But another closely related problem I think is imaging. To my ear most phones are completely uninteresting because they don't present anything like the impression of music played in a performance space at some distance from me - that includes virtually all of the 'flagship' phones out there. That's hardly surprising - most music is now amplified and reinforced when played and recorded in studios on multi-track systems - a 'wall of noise'. The 'super-stereo' effect and hyper-realism of playback on phones is initially striking but completely 'synthetic' to my ear. There are some phones, however, that to my ear sound better - the HD800S, the T1, the K812, the MySphere and the MA900 are examples. I guess it's no coincidence they're made by firms historically associated with recording acoustic music: Sennheiser, AKG, Beyerdynamic, Sony. So, to return to your point, I persevere with phones that appeal to me because I think they can do what loudspeakers do - but better. They certainly don't sound like most other phones - and they might well be seen as comparatively 'veiled' or 'distant' for example. But it seems that's often what I'm looking for.