Very good feedback! I've got roughly 80 hours on mine through all sorts of different sources. They have really settled down quite nicely. I'll listen to A LOT of music in an average day. It seems like lately if I hear high frequency harshness it's when paired with the continental v2 and streaming 320 Kbps electronic music off of spotify (i.e. I think it's a source material/signal issue, and not the P7s problem.)
I really want to like the continental with the P7. I definitely hear glimpses of tubey goodness with the pairing. However, channel imbalance is all too noticeable, and there's just too much gain I'm afraid. I really never take it past 12:00. Before the P7s had decent time through them, the continental actually caused some distortion in the left driver on 3 different occasions, with different source material each time.
Additionally, from what I understand about pairing ultra efficient cans with higher impedance sources, it can fairly significantly effect the frequency response. I think this is why I find the harsh upper mid/high frequency harshness at times. Is there any sort of additional gear to place in line, or modifications I could make to the continental to address any of this?
Have you noticed anything similar with the Lyr? I'm not familiar with its output impedance... Is it variable?
So far I'm very pleased with the P7 paired with the original CLAS and RSA Shadow.
When I'm home I've had great luck with the Scarlett 2i4.
The microstreamer is ok by itself. Just quite noticeably not as open as the CLAS and Shadow pairing.
Interestingly, I paired the microstreamers line out to the shadow and it wasn't a bad combination. Pretty fun sounding!
I'm having a lot of fun trying different sources with these things! Is the reason why they scale really well because of their high sensitivity and efficiency? On one hand this makes a lot of sense to me, as it seems like highly efficient and sensitive cans would be quite transparent, thus showing differences in various sources. However, on the other hand most everything I read on these forums says that high impedance cans are by their nature very sensitive to a good source, for example the Sennheiser HD 650s. Can anyone possibly explain any of this to me?
Also, very interested to read your comparisons with the HE-400s when you get around to it!