Edit: This is the Urbanite On-ear
The Cowon J3. It's a discontinued, but very good unit. I use a splitter to avoid plugging/unplugging into the J3's jack over and over during comparisons. I don't use two at the same time, not only is power split (which hardly matters in this particular situation), but the frequency response of each headphone will change a bit due to the differences between the impedance curves of each headphone. That's avoided by having two headphones of the same model or just one alone altogether.
I'm definitely loving the comfort and visual style of the headphone; the padding on the headband is rubber, not pleather like most of the other models, and it manages to be sufficient, I think. Better than my HD8 DJ, which I had to add padding to, unlike every other Senn I've owned, tried, or currently own. The flat cable is nice, but those plugs look like they will eventually fail where the cable runs out of the plug quickly. I'm using my own cables to avoid putting any more use into the stock cable than the guys before me who tried it out.
The "hollowness" you hear is excess resonances/reverb in the cups, possibly along with the drivers not being able to "breathe enough". The treble roll-off that the Urbanite has is pretty common for a closed-back, only a few extent farther, but that doesn't leave things sounding hollow, only reverb does that. I know how to fix the issue, but this is essentially not my headphone so I will have to get one of my own later to do that.
I find my M50x with HD280 pads to sound far more natural than the Urbanite, but it doesn't suffer from any of Urbanite's problems. A sine sweep reveals a pretty balanced FR in the mids and treble for Urbanite, actually. There are dips and bumps, but most are almost subtle. There most noticeable midrange bump is around 2.5kHz, but that could easily be just this specific Urbanite, the next Urbanite on-ear that someone obtains could have a weaker 2.5k bump and a slightly stronger 6k bump, and so forth. The drivers are suffocating in this housing, it sounds like to me. Pulling the cups away from my ears alleviates some of the muffleness and slightly improves upper mids and, to a lesser extent, lower treble. Even the hollowness of the sound gets fixed that way a bit, centered sounds are then in the center and not "split" into a ring around you, as if the sounds are trying to avoid you like you have ebola or something. Thus, I think swapping out the earpads with equivalent, but thicker, velours would help the headphone a good bit.
As it is, I would say it is a decent headphone at the prices I see the Momentum On-ear going for lately. I wouldn't recommend it at $200, but hey, the Momentum On-ear began at $200, so I figure the Urbanite will drop in price as much, too.
The midrange is potentially very good, I like that it does not favor male vocals over female vocals or vice versa, and it will probably be very pleasant and more spacious and fleshed out with some acoustic foam in the cups to kill the reverb, but in its stock form, it is strangely a bit un-engaging and kind of weird, though not as awful as HE400. I do like it when the midrange is tilted up towards the upper mid in a headphone, and flat-ish is fine, too.
I think the relatively level FR "wants" the midrange to sound natural, but the reverb hurts its intent to a degree.
The treble could be good with different pads, but as it is it is muffled. There's some slight clarity in the lower treble, but the clarity diminishes quickly with increasing frequency. If clarity can be brought to the treble, this headphone would end up a bit bright as the range from 11kHz and up is a little stronger than 6k-10k in the sine sweep.
The bass is at least the best part. Decent control, good clarity, good texture and depth. It would sound a bit better if the treble were clearer since that's where a lot of the harmonic content in sound is. No one-note syndrome here. The upper bass and lower mids aren't so boosted that you get overly "chesty" or somewhat muddy sounding male vocals, either.
Versus my Momentum On-ear, Urbanite has very, very similar bass, the clarity, texture, amount, control, etc. edit: but subbass is a bit stronger on the Momentum. The Momentum has more midrange clarity but its upper mids boost leaves it sounding noticeably nasal while the Urbanite is a bit dark in part of the upper mids. The Urbanite has the advantage in isolation, as the Momentum hardly offers any, and the Urbanite can fold up neatly.
HD360pro sounds more open, cleaner, and clearer all throughout, but it is not as bassy as the Urbanite nor as punchy. 360's bass is also bit less controlled than the Urbanite's. The Urbanite is the least detailed of the three headphones, but a little acoustic foam in the cups might change that a bit. It also has the largest soundstage of the three, although nothing quite like my full-sized closed-backs like DT770 and M50x.
With a little modding, Urbanite could be the best at acoustic music versus HD360 and the Momentum On-ear, but as it is, I'm not all that happy with its sound. People into rock and electronic should consider other headphones.
Edit2: I want to try to explain the bit with sine sweeps a bit differently: a sine sweep without any audio processing/effects shows you more or less what's going on with the FR while "disregarding" things like poor clarity, lots of "clarity" from boosted treble, masking of the sound due to reverb, and more. I'm guessing that's a bunch of psychoacoustics stuff that a "dry" sine sweep "ignores". Treble is very even with the midrange in the Urbanite, but sounds "recessed" due to a major lack of clarity. The CHC Silverado, for example, has mildly boosted treble, yet it sounds "treble-recessed" with music playback as well due to a lack of clarity. So the sine sweep stays the same volume with the Urbanite On-ear throughout most of the mids and treble, while on the Silverado it is louder as it goes through the treble range relative to the midrange.
Momentum On-ear, as another example, sounds recessed in the lower mids out of the box in a rather similar manner. I'm thinking that depending on how mixes are done, the music may just "bypass" that "recession", so you've got that going on apart from everyone having different ears, thus some of us say that Momentum On-ear has a very forward and mostly balanced midrange, and some feel the lower mids are too recessed.
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