The AWAS is here! The wood is a darker red than it looked in the product page photos, which is nice. The product page made it look like a tomato red color, but this red is more dignified IMO. The headphone looks very good and it feels very good in the hand.
Comfort-wise, it's fine, but it could be better. Audio Technica always uses earpads that are a bit too thin for my preference. My ears stick out quite a bit (25mm measured from the front at the cheekbone), so even with the angled drivers my earlobes are smushed against the driver. For reference, the Sony MDR-Z1R just barely gives my ears enough space to not get pressed against something in the earcup. Not the worst I've ever experienced, but not as comfortable as it could be. It reminds me a bit of the A990Z where I needed to swap to thicker earpads in order for the comfort to really work. The headband is alright. I think the two-piece design is pretty neat, but it could use a bit more padding on the underside where it meets the scalp. It's better than the stock wings were on the A990Z, but worse than the A990Z with thicker earpads. Also, for people with lumpy heads like me, it's important to get the angle right, because the wrong angle means that the weight isn't evenly distributed across both arcs and that gets uncomfortable very quickly. Unfortunately, the AWAS doesn't have the "disappear on head" comfort that I get with some other headphones.
More on the earpads and earcup: I wish the earcup could swing upwards and downwards a bit more. The design of the attachment fork limits the upward swing, so the earpads make a better seal above my ears than below. I'm not sure if I'm getting a good seal below my ears as a result (and the thin earpads don't help in that regard), and the lateral clamp pressure on my head is more concentrated above my ears rather than distributed all around. I recall a similar issue on the A990Z, so it's a bit unfortunate that this seems to be a limitation of AT's earcup attachment design. Also, since the earcups don't rotate downwards all that much, the bottoms of the earpads get pressed against each other more than the other parts, so I can already see deformation in the foam at the bottom of the left earpad. This doesn't help with pad longevity or the acoustic seal. All in all, comfort is just ok. Better than the stock A990Z, but it would be even better with a bit more earpad thickness and headband padding. Maybe I could attach some extra cushioning there.
In the picture is the 5ft PlusSound cable that was included by the seller. It's wayyy better than the stock unbalanced cable in every practical way. The stock cable is thin, rigid, and ridiculously microphonic! And ugly on top of all that. The PlusSound cable is flexible, soft, nicely braided, minimally microphonic, and beautiful to look at, everything that you could want in a cable. I just need to keep it away from my cat as she has a tendency to bite braided cloth cables. She's a cable connoisseur! I'm not much of a cable roller, so I didn't notice any notable difference between the stock cable and this cable in terms of sound, but I'll probably do a few A/B tests to try it out. I'm very glad the seller included the cable, as I probably wouldn't have bought such a cable myself.
Speaking of sound...
The AWAS is what I remember the pad-rolled A990Z as sounding like at its best. Vocals are rich and forward but not shouty. String plucks are very well defined. Treble is extremely airy with cymbals and hi-hats cutting through the mix with ease. Bass is limited in quantity, but subjectively fast and can hit surprisingly hard. The sound overall is bright yet also not fatiguing at the same time, while still retaining a bit of warmth in the low-end. Soundstaging is decent; it's not super-spacious like the MDR-Z1R, but it's also not in my face. It has everything that I expected an AT to have in its sound. In that way, I'm very pleased with its sound.
I'm still in the initial evaluation phase in terms of sound, and I recently acquired another headphone as well which will split my listening time, so it will probably take some time to fully understand the AWAS. But my first impressions can be summed up as the AWAS being like a remaster of the pad-rolled A990Z, in the sense of a videogame remaster. A good remaster of an old videogame should look and play like what you
remember the original game looking and playing like. The AWAS sounds like what I nostalgically recall the A990Z sounding like, including all of its good parts that I fondly remember while smoothing over the bad parts.
So, I take it as me having more time for music. So, I am blessed that I have the means to enjoy the music. 
