I'm a retired professional musician/teacher.  Most of what I listen to is what's increasingly dismissed as "marginalized" owing to my age demographic.  My idea of the greatest rock band of all time is Blood, Sweat & Tears.  (I'm casual friends with Roy Halee, although I haven't spoken with him recently, we're both trumpet players...)   I'm sorry that you dislike what I disliked and our biases somewhat cancel. They're not BAD headphones, and that seems to be the "common denominator" in the commentary about them.  My biases are toward Jazz/Classical/Acoustic and what most  think of as highly produced (prepared/rehearsed) types of music.  I.E., Mercs/RCA Living Stereo minimalist miked  type things. That probably marginalizes ME a bit. I'm a fan of AT.  I have several of their mics, including a  pair of the 4050's, the single point 822 (I know it's getting long in the tooth but man does it a great job if you can't be picky about setup) and I'm quite fond of the AT-150MLX MM cart.  (I've owned at least a dozen of their cartridges and liked nearly all of them.)  So, please underestand that I'm not biased against the brand.  But the rest of what I have by them raises my expectations.  The price point thing is getting weird now, because there's spurts of (to me, at least) WILD street price inflation hitting us differently depending on what part of the Pacific rim items come from. (Japan's gone nuts, but only on certain things...strange...) Those Superlux 'phones are more or less about the same (but the other brand name they're being imported under is down around $30.00 or so shipped, or was..) These things are in flux now more than ever.  Peace...

^^^What the heck are you talking about? You're all over the place with that post, very hard to follow, and what you just said had nothing to do with your review, and you named dropped a semi famous musician for no apparent reason, I'm confused...

Interesting.  I said that I was a retired professional musician and teacher, and proffered the comment to provide some background on why I like what I like and how I came to like it. That was the only reason it was mentioned.  Roy Halee is NOT a famous musician. I know him because we met on a trumpet group and he private messaged me about some posts I had made pointing out why so many of the records he and Lou Waxman were involved with rank as some of the best sounding popular music records of their time and place, specifically on the label he worked for.   (They get reissued, i.e.,"Mo-Fi"-ed a LOT.) I didn't know he was a member there until he contacted me and a friendship was struck.   What he IS, is a well known Producer (Simon & Garfunkel, and B,S&T among others) which again, is why I included mentioning him. I addressed Koolpep's question regarding what music I listened to and what MY biases are.  (We all have them.)   My crucible is Real (acoustic) instruments in a real (if arbitrarily created, as in the case of Halee's pop recordings) space.  It was meant to be a civil reply to a comment I took at face value.  I don't expect everybody to like what I like.  It's irrational to think that everybody would.  I'm always listening and I like discussing music (in general) and gear (in general-unless it degrades into a P***ing contest, which is where I have no interest in seeing this discussion go.)  It's just one more opinion, but I made my living in Music and I trust my own perceptions. Which is what we all should do.  I've made no attacks on anyone's preferences.  I just spoke to mine.    If you like the AT Headphones, good on 'ya, man.  But I can't keep everything I try, so choices had to be made. Sorry that you had trouble understanding the context, especially since the reply was to satisfy a request FOR context.   The tone of your post tends to make me think that you don't care to understand.  The presentation of the headphones were "dry" (some might invoke the descriptor "threadbare".) Instruments sound thinner and "smaller" as opposed to creating the instrument in a way that allows the listener to suspend disbelief and the signal chain disappears.  So without trying to invoke more invective, for me, they lacked "transparency".  I was disappointed.  A lot of people aren't. I have no connection with Audio Technica whatsoever, other than as a retail customer.  It's one person's opinion.  

I know I need to do an actual review of it.  I'm covered up now, but I'll get to it......

Uh-oh. At 195 hours of burn-in I randomly decided to use them to play CS:GO so as not to disturb the neighbors and I suddenly liked what I was hearing: the ear-piercing lobe at 6-7 kHz is mostly gone, the sibilance around 11 kHz is also almost gone, they're still bright but no longer so much that they can't be enjoyed, and now the only thing I can mention as a deficiency is 3-6 dB of missing bass around 100 Hz. I'll have to add something behind the pads to make them protrude more at the back so they hug my head better behind the jawline and see if that fixes the bass, but overall I'm now positively impressed with how far they extend toward both ends and how fast they respond (though I only have mediocre headsets to compare them to in my previous experience).

*how far they extend toward both ends of the frequency spectrum
 
It looks like these last 70-80 hours of playing only 20 Hz - 20 kHz frequency sweeps are what finally did the job of burning them in properly. The pink noise I was using for the first 50 hours rather made them worse, while playing actual music did mostly nothing for them. Frequency sweeps is where it's at.