X3

  Yeah, I really think we hear things differently here... I am in no way an AKG fan (the K712 Pro I have here are not even mine so I am in no way biased towards them - rather biased towards Hifiman which is my favourite headphone brand). I may agree that some people will prefer more coherent...

  I have nothing against HE-400i, really... But I would have a hard time recommending the majority of Hifiman headphones to someone who really wants a HQ soundstage. K712 Pro have significantly better soundstaging than stock HE-400, HE-4 and HE-500 - and I doubt HE-400i are any different given...

The white variant is perfect...

  I cannot answer this for you because I haven't heard HE-400i (or woodies from audio-technica) :-) I can only say that if soundstage is important for you, K712 Pro are going to deliver much better than HE-400i it seems, given the fact that it already overperforms HE-500 (even with grill mod -...

  Soundstage of K712 Pro is definitely better than on HE-500 (have both here)... which are said to have better soundstage than HE-400i. K712 Pro have more expansion in both width and depth, with better imaging.  Mids are very fine on K712 Pro but they are not in the top league (not ortho great).

  You should notice that the bass is not truly linear (read neutral) on Tyll's graph for HE-400i (rather going constantly downward). Zoom-in and compare with the HE-500, HE-400 and HE-560 which all keep the same or higher amplitude (dB) from 100 to 30 Hz. Is this going to be noticable in...

  The problem with subbass is that it is very much related to quality of seal (which can really vary from person to person and situation)... Frequency response charts are often better than the reality in terms of how good the achieved seal is (not always but take into account hairs, glasses...

I would really like to thank you David for the majestic piece you brought to life here... Invaluable, really. Too bad it's mostly done.

The DAC is not even released... So I don't really understand the motivation behind this ridiculous hypetrain (happening not only in this dedicated thread which is truly annoying for those not really interested in some kind of mysterious multithousand dollar unreleased product). Some of you may...

  The price will be most probably too high for me... but one thing that really concerns me are the focuspads. While I could theoretically easily substitute them for some other pads on HE-400i and HE-560, this won't be as easy on the HE-1000 due to the non-circular shape of their cups ( + maybe...

  AFAIK, there is no worldwide standard of objective evaluation of headphones and therefore all the claims about one headphone being technically superior to another is subjective, as already said. We may agree on many things as far as technicalities are concerned, using our ears and brains for...

  The problem is that once you get enough experience, live with significantly different sounding high-end headphones for several years, you figure out and develop certain preferencies, or should I say a list of priorities from the most to the least important ones? This will be your guideline...

  Oh my, another uberdetailed HD800/SR-009ish headphone... Would be nice to have some change, like competition to SR-007 mkI.