I have since sold these headphones after experiencing much better.
These headphones gave me a poor taste of high end audio and ruined my enthusiasm. I preferred the shp9500s to this and akg k712s/612s do what this attempts to do in a more agreeable package.
Let's start with the bass. The extension was quite limited and in fact all it was, was a mid bass bump. Instead of feeling the punch of a kickdrum or the reverberance of a bass guitar all you got was a warm blanket of enveloping distorting bass with no physicality. It wasn't controlled enough to feel like a good warm headphone.
The lower mids were sucked out, making sounds come across as distant, I'll come onto this in soundstage again, but it's a really poor quality. Listening more closely you notice a lot of the lower mids are smoothed over quite often the seperation between different notes and tones are merged together. Reducing fundamentals to simply a noise, it sounded quite disjointed and didn't feel real.
The upper mids are bumped on these which could easily five people the impression that it has got smooth Vocals with presence. However the presence region is inaccurate and ultimately the subtle dip spike causes a significant hazey quality to the sound.
The upper mids are where you get a sense for the space from the sound, where the lower mids make up the actual sound. In this case the unevenness leads to a hazey characteristic to the sound as if vocals are pushing through a film of air. It's the equivalent of trying to see something through a fog.
This leads into the lower treble where you have a spike in the sibilance region. A common misconception I have seen is that sibilance is solely from the headphone. It's inherent to a lot of vocals and instruments and up to a mastering. What a headphone does is change how forward the sibilance is and the qualities of the sibilance.
What the Fidelio x2s do is present them in a forward peaky way. S sounds and cymbals usually have a trailing decay, what the x2s do is push this forward and make it sound sharper than it is. This leads to a peircing quality.
Which ultimately makes them very fatiguing and isn't natural.
The treble isn't much better.
There is an inherent grain to the treble which comes across as constant background noise in almost every song. Even modern songs produced in something like 32bit with no artificial tape hiss have this grainy quality ackin to listening to old satellite tv speakers.
Ultimately the upper treble is quite lacking, there is a lack of air to the sound which would make a lot of the problems easier to live with.
One thing I notice this is praised about is soundstage.
It's reported as wide sounding.
My comment on this is that the dip in the midrange makes every sound originate further away than it does.
This doesn't do what headphones with good soundstage do and give you a varying sense of depth and width. Sounds either happen for right , far left or right in front of you and a bit forward.
Commenting on imaging and layering it's quite poor in this sense. The dt880600ohm,k712pro/612pro and hd6x0 outperform it quite significantly in this characteristic. You get a greater idea of how the sound decays in it's stage, how distant certain sounds are in any of those headphones.
The layering is also significantly worse with sounds often merging together and having similar qualities as opposed to what they should do and be different.
The overall tonal balance is quite poor and introduces significant colouration. This would be fine if the technical ability was at it's tier, but it isn't. The timbre is quite metallic across the board which indicates an unnatural quality of decay.
This review is in reference to it's price point it's not technically capable enough to be considered mid-fi by any stretch of the imagination. I'd even go as far as saying the dt990 is more technically capable with the same v shape tuning and arguably better comfort.
If you want a wide sounding Headphone with good imaging the a900x is probably a better option and more agreeable.
My main issue with these headphones is that they are priced to compete in a saturated market and don't compete with any of the options currently there.
These headphones gave me a poor taste of high end audio and ruined my enthusiasm. I preferred the shp9500s to this and akg k712s/612s do what this attempts to do in a more agreeable package.
Let's start with the bass. The extension was quite limited and in fact all it was, was a mid bass bump. Instead of feeling the punch of a kickdrum or the reverberance of a bass guitar all you got was a warm blanket of enveloping distorting bass with no physicality. It wasn't controlled enough to feel like a good warm headphone.
The lower mids were sucked out, making sounds come across as distant, I'll come onto this in soundstage again, but it's a really poor quality. Listening more closely you notice a lot of the lower mids are smoothed over quite often the seperation between different notes and tones are merged together. Reducing fundamentals to simply a noise, it sounded quite disjointed and didn't feel real.
The upper mids are bumped on these which could easily five people the impression that it has got smooth Vocals with presence. However the presence region is inaccurate and ultimately the subtle dip spike causes a significant hazey quality to the sound.
The upper mids are where you get a sense for the space from the sound, where the lower mids make up the actual sound. In this case the unevenness leads to a hazey characteristic to the sound as if vocals are pushing through a film of air. It's the equivalent of trying to see something through a fog.
This leads into the lower treble where you have a spike in the sibilance region. A common misconception I have seen is that sibilance is solely from the headphone. It's inherent to a lot of vocals and instruments and up to a mastering. What a headphone does is change how forward the sibilance is and the qualities of the sibilance.
What the Fidelio x2s do is present them in a forward peaky way. S sounds and cymbals usually have a trailing decay, what the x2s do is push this forward and make it sound sharper than it is. This leads to a peircing quality.
Which ultimately makes them very fatiguing and isn't natural.
The treble isn't much better.
There is an inherent grain to the treble which comes across as constant background noise in almost every song. Even modern songs produced in something like 32bit with no artificial tape hiss have this grainy quality ackin to listening to old satellite tv speakers.
Ultimately the upper treble is quite lacking, there is a lack of air to the sound which would make a lot of the problems easier to live with.
One thing I notice this is praised about is soundstage.
It's reported as wide sounding.
My comment on this is that the dip in the midrange makes every sound originate further away than it does.
This doesn't do what headphones with good soundstage do and give you a varying sense of depth and width. Sounds either happen for right , far left or right in front of you and a bit forward.
Commenting on imaging and layering it's quite poor in this sense. The dt880600ohm,k712pro/612pro and hd6x0 outperform it quite significantly in this characteristic. You get a greater idea of how the sound decays in it's stage, how distant certain sounds are in any of those headphones.
The layering is also significantly worse with sounds often merging together and having similar qualities as opposed to what they should do and be different.
The overall tonal balance is quite poor and introduces significant colouration. This would be fine if the technical ability was at it's tier, but it isn't. The timbre is quite metallic across the board which indicates an unnatural quality of decay.
This review is in reference to it's price point it's not technically capable enough to be considered mid-fi by any stretch of the imagination. I'd even go as far as saying the dt990 is more technically capable with the same v shape tuning and arguably better comfort.
If you want a wide sounding Headphone with good imaging the a900x is probably a better option and more agreeable.
My main issue with these headphones is that they are priced to compete in a saturated market and don't compete with any of the options currently there.
I am running them from a Keces DA-131 DAC into a Keces HA-171 amp and sound is nothing like you mention in your review. I'll continue to evaluate them but right now I'm impressed... listening to some Lee Ritenour tribute to Wes Montgomery.