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Why is bass a dirty word for them?
Well, to be honest, bass is a dirty word for a lot of 'audiophiles'. Bass tends to get associated with particular musical genres that tend to receive a fair amount of (perhaps deserved) derision. Bassheads who pack their car stereos full of subwoofers don't help bass' press image either. If you look at something like the Sony Muteki component speaker system-in-a-box with 2095 watts of power and 4 (that's right, 4 subwoofers) you see the appeal to the mass market with the sheer amount of bass, and the general idea is that the mass market is lowest common denominator stupiditiy.
So it's very often that people will say that they 'don't want too much bass, they just want to hear what is in the music'. It's an elitist attitude, but I don't want to offend anyone here - almost all of us are elitist here, because after all we like and appreciate quality, whether it be quality sound or quality music.
Listening to IEMs like the CK90Pro and the Radius DDM (and actually, what started a real appreciation of bass for me, the CKS70) was that there's actually a lot of pyschoacoustic information in bass, and things don't really sound natural without enough bass extension, decay and quantity. The keyword is natural - how close it sounds to real life. It's just as important as treble.
Now etymotic has an industry reputation as producing treble orientated, accurate phones. It's an image of a pristine sound that will always have a market for people who stick by the attitude of bass as a mass market frequency. I don't think they would want to damage the brand image by releasing something that is dramatically different. It won't capture the market who won't spend anything on earphones in the first place, and it will lose the respect of those who think of Etymotic Research as the accurate, technical brand. Reputation is a pretty important thing in audio.
I think they probably just want to capture the people who have heard about etymotic and want to move up to a higher quality sound, but are a little bit put off by the descriptions of Etymotic as a brand completely devoid of bass. Before I came to head-fi, that was my understanding of the brand. Not everyone goes to Head-Fi after all.
I know this is a lot of assumptions to make, but thats the impression I gather.