So I got these a few weeks ago as a birthday gift to myself, having returned a pair of bose to Best Buy. My previous headphones (Klipsch Image One) were great, comfortable, light, but had a fatal flaw: the cord. So the sound no longer presented itself on one side. I sullenly returned them and thought that I would not experience better sound with any other headphones out there.
I decided to finally spend and get these guys. Arrived within 1 day and I was extremely excited. At first the sound was good, but not mind-blowing. Plugging them into my tablet (Nexus 7) and my phone (Nexus 5) made it worse as the sound was terrible. The 2 devices just do not have the capability of amping the sound properly. I thought: damn, well I may as well just use them with my desktop and my laptop. I changed the equalizer settings on itunes and kicked off some music. Holy cow the sound was suddenly great. I tried varieties of songs: classical, rap, rock, electronica... all good.
Then I plugged them into my macbook pro and fired up google play music. The sound was terrible. I wanted to equalize the sound coming out of the laptop, so I found some instructions online and downloaded soundflower and AU Lab. I then played around with the equalizer settings and set them to the following:
Kicked off the music and holy cow... the bass is intense... almost overwhelmingly intense, but so well expressed. The sound quality is fantastic for the price that I paid ($130). I can't believe how good these guys are... I can't bear to listen to music with anything else now (even my 5.1 speakers at home). After having failed with so many headphones and earphones in the past (JVC HARX, Bose, various sony headphones, Shure earbuds since 2006), I finally found the perfect pair. I'm so happy.
Thanks to you all and to others for the advice on getting these. These are amazing.