Sorry it took a few days to get back. I received real IE80s from Best Buy 2 days ago. I'm going to post some pics to show you the differences. First thing I noticed was that the cable shorted out at the jack in under 2 minutes. It's usable, but I have to keep my phone still to be able to listen to it. The next thing I noticed is that the bass knobs don't work at all. I played Techmaster PEBs Bassgasim and there was no noticeable effect on bass when adjusting the knobs. I had both fake and real IE8s and the bass knobs didn't work on the fake ones either. As far as the look and feel I cannot tell the difference with the exception of the real ones, the brushed aluminum is ever so slightly more metallic. You have to hold both up to a bright light at an angle to catch it. I took some photos of it but it doesn't show up on camera. The look and feel of the cable including the subtle springiness, length, thickness and the coating that I really like are identical. Normally when you buy fakes the cable looks real but feels cheap in your hand and is thinner and sometimes shorter that the real one. The box is a different story. There're obvious differences in the boxes most noticeably the fakes are missing the QR code sticker that has the ID number that registers them as real.
Here's a pic showing the missing sticker.^^
In this pic the real ones are on the bottom. As you can see the fake ones are missing the extra barcode on the top fight of the box and instead have instructions on how to open the box, where as the real ones have the same instruction on the bottom left. There are a few other obvious differences as well.
On the back of the box the only difference I could see is the names of the countries are darker on the real ones.
On the top of the box the Sennheiser logo is on the bottom left of the real ones and the bottom right on the fake ones.
The size, material used and quality of print are the same for both boxes. Usually the quality of the print and packaging
of fake headphones is noticeable even if you don't have the real ones to compare it to.
So how do they sound?
I'm going to preference this by saying I've bought a lot of fake headphones over the years and compared them to the real ones. The sound quality usually goes from JVC marshmallows to completely unlistenable where spoken word is unintelligible to massive spikes in in the FR that an EQ can't fix. For the A/Bing I used an iPhone 6 Plus and an iPad 3. The tracks that I usually use for this type of thing are on my computer which I can't use ATM. The quality of tracks are standard Apple quality and 320k. I enjoy a warm bassy sound. I am familiar with the IE8 sound dig as I've had them for 4 years. I listened to the fakes for about 7 hours a day for two days straight before the real ones Arrived from Best Buy. To my ears, as far as I can tell, the fakes and the real IE80's use the same drivers. The sound quality is exact the same. They both have the same very wide soundstage, the same layering, the same mid bass hump, the same veiled mids. Obviously I couldn't believe this and thought my ears were playing tricks on my. I A/Bed them for four hours trying to poke holes in the sound. I used 9 songs and listened to them over and over. I added a splitter so I could listen to both IEMs at the same time. I had a friend come over and hand me each one, one at a time so I didn't know if i was listening to the fake pair or real pair. For the test we used the same cable on both sets of IEMs since the fake cable had a short in it. In all, I couldn't tell the difference between the two. If the bass knobs worked on the fake ones they would be set at the minimum.
I forgot to mention. The carrying case for the fakes came apart in 2 pieces after I pulled out the drawer. I pushed the pieces back together and then tried hard to pull it back apart and it stayed together. The number of tips on both is the same as is the thickness and feel of the tips. All assories are included and have the same look and feel to them.
