I personally wouldn't buy these again now (that I know more about audio) than $75 new. However, these are my first headphones, and I have some sentimental attachments to them. I actually prefer these to my HE-5/EF-5 currently, though unfortunately it is down and I can't do a perfect A/B comparison for now. I wouldn't recommend anyone to get these now, but these were the first phones I toted to school and convinced three of my friends to purchase decent audio. All of them have gotten Senns (two of them with the HD555s - one used, the other I will...

Testing setup: Nuforce uDac > EF-5 > HE-5   vs   uDac > Sennheiser HD 555 (foam modded, with thousands of hours of burn in)     Out of the box, HE-5s sound abysmal compared to my HD555s through uDac. That came as a bit of a surprise to me, as I expected them to sound better even without burn in. I appreciated a drastic improvement after a few hundred hours of white noise, pink noise, and sine wave sweeps. However, since I was listening throughout the entire period intermittently, it might just be that I was getting more accustomed...