I am kind of surprised that Audio Technica did not promote AP2000ti well. I bought it without demoing when I found WP900 sounded awesome, which changed my opinion about Audio Technica. They can actually make some nice closed back portable headphone without too much distortion or weak bass. And AP2000ti is a real surprise. In the past two days, I demoed L5000, AWKT, and AWAS, and now I realize AP2000ti is really something that lies between AWKT and AWAS, and owns some sound signature of L5000. AP2000ti is marketed as a portable headphone, but which does not mean it sounds like portable headphones. There are some high price portable headphones on the market, like the aeon flow (two generations). Both generations sound horrible to me. The biggest reason is those two ones are both hard to drive, and the sounds are both flat: bass and treble are just weak, which makes the sound boring. They have the advantages how they are advertised: like clean sound, good sound stage, nice fit and design, but which don't make them good headphones. Closed back Aeons have good noise isolation, but which I believe is also the key to the disadvantages, which means they have to cut off a lot of bass to make the sound clean enough, and the lack of air low of the back makes them less sensitive and hard to drive. AP2000ti, although with a higher price (actually there are some special offers around $800) and worse noise isolation(Audio Technica closed back headphones all have big enough vent and are actually semi-closed, and this should be the case for almost all Japanese closed back headphones), does a better job as a portable headphone: easy enough to drive, balanced and fun sound, and its own great sound signature over the high and mid-high frequency. The sound can be compared to all closed back headphone at this price range, instead of portable ones. The $1250 is accurate, although most people don't think or believe so, and Audio Technica already makes the price much lower in some way. Now when they have the new wood full size headphones, people are more interested and have more confidence and expectation, but AP2000ti is actually at the same level if you only care about the sound.