Hello folks - long time lurker, first time poster (at least on this forum).
Had the M6's land in my mailbox this morning, and have spent most of the day playing around with them on and off. Thought I would share my initial impressions as a former pro audio sound man. These are the first IEM's I've bought - everything up until now has been full sized closed back models, mostly from Koss, right up to the R/80's that are now retired due to driver issues. These are intended to replace those phones and sound better doing it.
Having given y'all some background, on to the M6's. I got mine right from MeElectronics, so I have the hard case (which I am very glad to have gotten. My listening sources for my initial impressions included the computer I'm typing this on, which does an ok job, a Sony D-NE510 CD/MP3 player, and an ancient Panasonic SL-NP500. That last one is a battery vampire, but it has among the best headphone amps of anything I've owned. Used it to make sure I was really hearing the full potential of these. Music ranged from pipe organ to electronic to 80's music... mostly the stuff I used to use to EQ with back in my pro audio days but also newer stuff I was really familiar with. Some pink noise and sine waves as well.
First, the memory wire - don't mind it, actually. I thought I would. Maybe it's due to the fact that I'm six and a half feet tall with big ears, I don't know, but it's not really uncomfortable at all.
Second, the tips. Nothing but the large ones work for me. The rest of them are way too small to get a good seal. No complaints about the large ones really... they're taking a bit of getting used to, but not bad. I like the level of isolation on these... not too much, not too little for my tastes.
So, how do they sound? Well... I have a problem here. Keep in mind that though I've been out of pro audio for a while, but still have a decent set of ears for frequency irregularities. I'm not getting the V shape impression from these... it's more of a weird looking W. Out of the box, these appear to have way too much boost between 4-7 kHz or so, and to me these are borderline unlistenable. Excellent bass down to about 20Hz, very good midrange, and so-so treble is what I'm experiencing at the moment. Response seems quite flat until they get up to the aforementioned lower treble range, and then it sounds like there is a nasty hump before they level off again. Somewhere in the air above 10kHz, there's another hump - this time not nearly as pronounced. Around 15 kHz, my own hearing drops off so it's definitely not above that number.
I am really hoping break-in tames these quite a bit yet. If not, I'm probably not going to be listening to these for long. They don't sound bad at all, but the humps in the response are really driving me nuts right now. Got a Zune coming, with which these are intended be used. No EQ to help me tame these... uh-oh. If it weren't for the level of detail in the bass these have, I'd probably just put them aside and try some other IEM. I'm still not sure I don't want to do that anyway. Maybe I just got a bad pair... I tend to doubt it though.
With that said, I'm wondering if anyone else experienced the same thing with these, and did break-in settle them down some?