It's been a long-time overdue but I figured, or remembered, I never got back to this thread with my thoughts on the Fostex T50RP Mk3 so here they go:
Out of the box and as soon as you place them on your ears they sound fun. What do I mean by fun...
Technically you could say that the lows and highs are very pronounced, specially the highs, but the mid-range doesn't feel muffled or unclear. The practical or more immediate effect is that it enriched all the songs I listened to. When I was first considering these headphones I was slightly concerned because I tend to prefer neutral sounding headphones and despite the pronunciation of the lows and highs they still feel neutral sounding but a livelier neutral sound, if that makes any sense.
One thing I noticed with them though was that with some types of music (like electronic) or experiences (like gaming) tended to leave me with some fatigue after a couple of hours. This fatigue I believe was both due to the stock ear-pads which aren't as horrible as some make them out to be, but do cause some slight discomfort on my slightly protruding ears after a while and also due to "highs" fatigue. It's a weird feeling that I never experienced before in a headphone but I after a couple of hours if I started listening to electronic music it was almost as if my ears were telling me "please stop with the highs, I've had enough" and to my ears the highs started sounding a bit drowsy.
So I started reading about the modifications everyone was doing and decided to start off with changing the ear-pads and though I wanted to get some Shure pads that were recommended by Zeos, I had to settle with the Brainwavz hybrid pads. These ones specifically if anyone is interested:
amazon link.
With these pads three things happened:
1. They became less fun. I think this is mostly due to the highs which became less saturated but it didn't feel as any other part of the sound signature changed immensely.
2 & 3. They became more comforting and less fatiguing even with long listening sessions. The added comfort of the ear-pads and their shape and components made them extremely enjoyable to hear even when using them for hours on end. Since I installed the new earpads I have not removed them from my DAC/AMP other than when I clean my desk.
I highly recommend these T50RP MK3 to anyone that appreciates great sound and wants a more fun listening experience but only if they have a headphone amp. When driven from lower impedance devices like my phone, you can drive them up to a decent volume but the sound feels a lot more bland and less enjoyable than it would with a dedicated amp. My Fiio E7 are capable of driving them to an enjoyable level, but they benefit significantly more from my powered DAC/AMP in High impedance mode. It really brightens up the sound.
With that caveat in mind, I highly recommend these headphones even to people that prefer neutral sound signatures.
