I got my headphones three days ago for $161 at Amazon. The sound is quite amazing and the built quality seems to be high. Engineers really cared how it was made and apparently did not want a lot of breakage. The size of the cups is almost perfect and the seal is good.
On the con side the cups don't extend low enough for my taste. I have a buzz cut and the phones fully extended barely reach the proper point on my ears. If I'm wearing a hat I have to choose to squash the hat to get the proper positioning or just wear the cups a little high (not by much).
But the one thing that is pretty much a deal-breaker is the pressure these things exert on my ears! Like a darn vice. I wear phones for long periods. Yesterday for 4 hours and I was relieved when I finally took them off in my car to listen to my car stereo. I wear glasses with the frame memory metal also so they deform and bounce back fine. But the M-80 kept crushing my ears something fierce.
A day earlier I bent the phones so that the cans would angle slightly forward to contour to my ears and that worked rather well. I tried to full extend the band horizontal to make them not crush my head so much but that did not work enough. Is there a way to make these not crush so hard?
For two weeks I demo'ed the Bose OE-2 and thought they were light-weight, cups fit nice since they were oval like our ears, and okay. They did not sound as good as some but were very comfortable. Yet I bought the ones without the iPod controls so that was a deal-breaker there having to reach down to my iPod to advance songs
So now I'm in limbo again. Accept the poorer sound but better comfort of the OE-2 or accept the powerful grip of the M-80...Or if there are other alternatives?
