The 7's normally sell for $300 up here in Canada, but when they went on sale for $99 I started to think pretty seriously about them. So I found this thread and it was helpful in making a decision. I already have the 4's, which are pretty decent but don't blow me away. I've been thinking of ordering a pair of 10's online which won't cost a heck of a lot more than the 7's on sale and that's what I was trying to make up my mind about.
When I read that the 7's are less punchy that's what sold me. That's really what I'm after, I hate punchy, and the perfect sound for me is clear and smooth. This sure sounded like it had the potential for that and I went right to the store to see if this was the case.
For instance, I bought the Beats Studio when they first came out, and while I wasn't crazy about the overpowering bass, I could live with that, it was the punchiness of them that I hated and ended up getting rid of them for that reason. I've tried out a lot of headphones over the years and this is a problem that a lot of them suffer from. I've been using Bose 15's lately as my headphone of choice, even though sonically they aren't very good at all without the right eq, with a horrible sounding midrange in particular, but I kept these because they are at least smooth and clear and I've been able to eq them to sound pretty nice overall.
After trying out some of the supplied tips, I ended up going with the medium tips that came with my 4's, and in fact these tips are way better fit for my ears than anything that came with the 7's. They are a bit uncomfortable but if they were perfectly comfortable you wouldn't be getting the right seal I guess.
People have commented on the cable noise with these and yeah there's some of that but I don't find it to be all that big of a deal, and with a thicker flat cable I guess you will get a little more, but not that much more.
I tried them out with my ipod and my clip+, these players are what they are and you really can't get good sound out of them no matter what you listen to them with, but the 7's were clearly the best headphone to my liking on these portable players. So already I was pretty happy but I wanted to see what these things could really do by plugging them into my computer where I could tweak things with my jriver media canter.
Well right out of the box these blew me away. Clear and smooth indeed. Some people may like bass that will rattle your skull, I do like bass but I'm more into quality and these really deliver. It even made tracks like Janet Jackson's All Nite which has an absurd amount of bass with is very difficult to clean up sound amazing. It's still way too much bass but it's still pretty clean. I listen to a lot of old R&B so this made me very happy, and other tracks were even nicer.
Even more impressive was it being able to handle some new age tracks I have which are very heavy in the very low end. I've never been able to listen to them with the parametric eq settings that I use, I'd get a buzz with it on. This is the 10-20 hz range that you feel more than hear but hearing buzzing isn't the idea. So no buzzing at all with the 7's, not only that, but it was phenomenal to listen to.
I don't want the 10's anymore, even without hearing them, if they are punchier and have more bass well that's not what I want. Of course we all differ in tastes but I'm so happy with these I'm using them as my main headphone now and couldn't be more pleased. The word balanced definitely fits these as everything is there in the right balance and the sound is simply awesome from my x-fi card in asio output and jriver player with my settings. On the portable players, well you can only get them to sound so good, but I'm enjoying myself more on the go as well.
In the end I would have paid $300 for these although I'm much happier paying a third of that and Klipsch rules!!!
