I had these for a week and decided to sell them again, they are not for me and ill briefly explain why.
First of all I got these after browsing the web for a while, I was looking for a new pair as I wrecked my beloved ESW9's. In a period of absence of real headphones I used iBeats (HTC urBeats) and borrowed a pair of M50's from a roommate, but required a good pair of cans for mself again.
Since I had been looking at the original TMA-1's when buying the ESW9's years ago, I figured the new Studio version should be more to my liking as the sound signature should be more towards neutral, sounds perfect!
Bought them online for 170 euros which is actually a fine price for these.
After arrival I was stocked, beautiful box and packaging, beautiful headphone design and two different pads to chose from. The cable on these is solid, but quite stiff, works well for home use while plugged into my stereo amplifier, sitting at my desk: the coiled cable works well and extends quite far. Its just a tad heavy for portable use.
After trying on both the pads to check for fit and sound the foam pads already shed a small snippet of foam from the cup; worries for durability. The foam pads where also not really to my liking as they don't really enclose because of their firmness they don't form to the head very well, on a flat surface they probably isolate well. Trying the pleather pads was a much better experience, much more comfortable and better sound isolation, but resemble much more of an on-ear headphone, very large ones at that.
The sound itself changes quite a bit when using either the foam pads or the pleather ones. The detail and soundstage on the foam pads was certainly bigger, but with the pleather ones the sound became a bit fuller as lower mids increased but soundstage decreased. I actually prefered the sound of the foam pads, but I couldn't use them because of the bad fit.
In both cases the bass sounds very full and timing is spot on, I didn't experience it as overpowering but well present and quite detailed as well, the mids are a bit recessed and there is a strange hump in the highs. As I mostly listen to EDM and rock music they should sound good with quite different genres, which these definitely didn't do to my liking. For EDM they are perfect! but for rock they where pretty much lacking. I love guitar tones and vocals and especially in that case these cans just sounded like they pushed all the upped mids into the same band of frequencies; like pushing this frequency range through a band pass filter. Over time this started to annoy me as it just didn't sound natural enough to my ears.
I tried to fix it by equalizing but found that the sound just became a bit muddy.
Eventually I ordered a new pair of ESW9's from amazon for the amazingly warm but very natural sound, at almost the same price. At least I now know what I want in my headphones, which is what I had all along.
