I've had a pair of ATH-M50s for a few weeks and I'm noticing a crackling/popping sound, usually subtle but sometimes very obvious, on sounds that sound high-volume enough to be clipped.   I found a nice song on YouTube with a downloadable 320 kbps MP3 that demonstrates a remarkable...

I bought a pair of Klipsch Image S4 and noticed this problem so I returned it as defective and bought a new pair, which ended up sounding exactly the same with exactly the same problem. I dismissed it as a problem with the Image S4 -- until I bought a pair of Audio-Technica ATH-M50s and noticed...