lol at £850 = $1347 I'd be pretty paranoid about it myself. Especially with no removable cable. Do you wear special snooker type gloves and have a separate wood cleaning kit?
Which headphones could you relate to in my sig? I've sold the headphones because they just didn't do it for me, but I remember them quite well.
The HD 558's were my first step into audiophillia and complete dissappointment. The most I ever spent on a headphone for music was £20 for a pair of walkman IEM's, so when I got my £100 558's which was a massive buy, I was left thinking "is this it?". It was so boring and dull. Lacked any sort of energy. I don't know how anybody would/could like this headphone and I ended up selling it after a month because I couldn't cope with my music being sucked of their energy anymore. Headfonia seems to suggest that the 598 is a different pat for sennheiser because it's so bright compared to it's other models, so maybe the 598 would be the only headphone I would enjoy from the Senn range.
The Next ones were the CAL!'s. Congested, claustrophobic and overrated. A/Bing them with my panny's I could pickout slightly more detail, and they had more bass quantity, but the horrible comfort combined with the "stuck in a locked wardrobe" and the boomy bass that thickened the whole spectrum too much making it slow, I had to get rid of them.
The SR225i's were a bit of a breather for me after coming from the CAL's. Initially I thought they were great and the open back gave my music some air which I was desperately missing. Ironically the forward presentation didn't work very well with j-rock, especially Scandal. Rock is already loud and intense as it is, and grado's forward presentation and treble peak, everything sounded like a mess. It was too close in that you couldn't see the whole picture. The vocals and instruments were fighting each other to be heard, which resulted in none of them being heard properly. Overall quite an unpleasant and deafening experience. They seemed to work really well with j-pop though, which by nature is less harsh and in your face compared to rock.
One thing I did learn from the grado's, I have to have an open back sound. It just makes the music sound right to me, which is why I'm a bit surprised that AT's higher end models all seem to be closed back, like your w3000's for example. I would have thought the closed back sound would be detrimental to the music as it cuts out the air and limits the sense of space.