Listen. I've been recording with thousands of dollars worth of microphones and have used studio monitor speakers for the past ten plus years. Headphones are somewhat new to me. But it is part of my job to be able to read the frequency response of microphones. The things I say are facts not opinions. It is simply impossible to do my job on colored headphones and headphones that dont have a extended frequency response. There are people on this forum that agree with my assessment of the 598 which are.my first headphones in many many years. One look at the frequency response chart shows a sharp drop off at 9khz. The human voice ends at about 7 to 8 khz. All the way to 20khz are mainly instruments and sound effects and they are very important frequencies that you need to hear when referencing microphone recordings. The voice is also affected by the cut btw... Yes I herd the m40x sound boring in comparison to the more colored and v shaped m50x. That's only good for people who want overly emphasized "fun" headphones. Check out this review of the Sony MDR where he mentions the m40x if you want mixing headphones. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b9CLPtr3RU&t=425s
Again, headphones are used for different applications. Some of you people use headphones as a magical toy. Some of us use them to do our job.
Well then, you should have done your homework, study the FR chart and know that these are not what you need in the first place.
Most of us, simple music lovers don't use them as a tool for assessing microphones. And with all the loudness wars and the way music is produced today, with brightness and artificial sounding vocals, and auto-tune that never EVER seems to go out of style, using headphone monitors to listen to that is simply painful even if you listen to that occasionally. You can't always listen to proper recorded music. Today's "music" is produced to sound LOUD out of bad equipment. Using flat-FR studio monitors to listen to that, DOUBLES the effect.
Yes, the HD 598 might be colored, but the ultimate result for a lot of people that love them is that they are versatile and enjoyable for a lot of genres, and very comfortable for home use, both in sound and physically. Which studio monitors do that?
The FR curve not always reflects the end experience that in this case IMO, is that of a very natural sound, more similar to what I hear from a set of speakers, whereas perfectly flat studio monitor headphones, will actually not sound that way when the sound source is half inch close to your ear. Yes they are good as a tool, but not for listening to music for hours.
So saying "they are awful for music" and "only for people that are magical in their way of thinking" are stereotypes and serve no good.
You are the one that is wrong in trying to use them as a tool when they are meant to be used... well, yes! as a "magical toy"
