I have a question for other owners of the HD238: Does the distortion in the bass ever go away? I must have around 35-40 hours on them now, and the bass is still distorting. I have tried removing the foam circles in the front of the driver, the foam in the rear of the driver, and even putting everything back as they originally came, and I'm still having issues with the bass distorting. It's not on just badly recorded music that it's distorting, it's distorting on everything with bass notes in it. I love the clarity, but I can't stand distortion. I'm not quite sure what to think anymore about the HD238's.
Eric
EDIT: I think I might have figured out why I'm having such a huge problem with distorted bass: 70% of my music is modern pop music and due to the boosted bass of the HD238 and the high overall volume levels of pop recordings (and the high bitrate AAC and Apple Lossless format I encode my music with) I believe that all of these factors together prove too much for the small driver of the HD238 to handle. If I turn the volume down a bit, the distortion goes away almost completely. I guess that is the tradeback of a thin diaphragm driver with a powerful magnet system, they can't handle loud volumes easily without distorting. Oh well, I guess I'll have to turn the volume down a bit, no big deal.