I don’t know about people claiming the ES to be opened and out of stage and or rivaling 800s/Stax in term of soundstage…. To me, it was very obvious that the ES R10 is still pretty much a closed back design, and it suffers all of those negativities. Yet, could still be claiming to be a class leading as it does a lot of goods, for example even in comparison to hd820, where there are weird dips in the lower mid bass and then mid spectrums, and a large bandwidth of those dips, while the ES also Has some dips, especially the upper sub-bass and then the lower mid bass, while bumping up the mid-bass a little bit, it doesn’t have any weirdness and dips in the mid spectrum as the hd820 does (which contributing to the large soundstage as well for the 820).
It is very, and I meant it literally, obviously, that the ES is still a closed back, and suffering all the closed back negativities, for example….it is not the most transparent phones. However, it is a very well crafted, well thought out products…..but please, don’t compare it to any of the opened back….May be the lower to mid tiers opened back….
but honestly, even among Flagship opened back, there are a huge battle and competitions going on, as far as Stax SR009 VS SR-009S and the new Omega….one can say that there are not much differences at all, but once you realize, and know the pros at which makes opened back to be enjoyable, and then diving deep into the comparison of nuances,
there are hugely and vastly differences beyond the diminishing return points that makes up all the pricing that are astronomically and hard to swallow.
So, yes, among opened back flagships, there are distinctive differences, and closed back is a closed back. While I know this for a fact, I gave the ES another chance when people claimed those previously, and since I never heard of the Legendary R10….. it turned me down. I guess, I love opened back for it airiness, separations, staging presentations, and I enjoyed closed back for it bass present, resolving without fatigues. So, I don’t really find myself enjoying something in between, like a closed back that neither having the sub bass, or the impacts of dynamism, and neither the staging, the openness, or the separations of opened backs. Then, and only until then, I would seek on for other nuances such as pitches, tonal balances of instruments that dwelling within their own main spectrums, then textures, and most of the time, I always found oddities with all of the phones that are staying neither closed, nor opened.
Yes, I am weird, and I am the minority, but that are my preferences. While I don’t have problems with different signatures such as warmth, dark, bright, cold, neutral….etc…I enjoy them all, what I look for in each designs are as mentioned, the technicalities of which make a designs and being excelled from that,
together with great tonality that covers the entire sound signatures (*1), and that is all I would be aiming for.
I have trimmed down my arsenal and slowly settled for my HD800s, it still, until this day, remaining the most transparent, accurate, wide staging with the dynamism and impacts that would put many to shame when properly connected to either a great DAP, or especially a desktop system. Then in comparison to others flagships, each of them have their own pros and cons, and if you are so particular, you would then ended up collecting them all, because just as
@paradoxper mentioned, no phones can cover all the goods and leaving all the bad….so, there really is no perfections. You will just have to compromise and accept them for what they are, until you really do understand what you want and how you want it, then that is the moment you would choose one to stick with it.
(*1) what I really meant was that, if a phone is warmer, then the whole tonal balances of everything within would be nicely balanced with that same warmth signatures induced for the whole spectrum. Now, to me, this would be one amazing warmer phones.