Well, I've had them for around 1,5 hours now. They arrived before the Fiio E10K dac I plan to drive them off (both bought used). Thus, I am running them straight out of my desktop computer. No external dac or amping!
Firstly, they are very comfortable. I should mention these have dekoni choice leather pads on them, not the stock ones. I can tell the padding on the headband is a bit thin, which starts being slightly annoying as I write this, so I might need to mod them for that down the line. The overall fit of the headphones however are superb. Very comfortable indeed.
Secondly, holy cow these definitely run great out of the laptop. I am at 30% in windows (max in Roon) and its plenty loud. Had I known this before purchasing, I probably wouldn't have bothered with the Fiio E10K.
So, onto the sound. These are as I said simply initial impressions. I am very aware of new toy syndrome, and something I want to be keenly aware of as I listen. I haven't listened to other headphones than the L500mk2 and sony mx4s in a long, long time. I can roughly remember how my previous headphones have sounded. I saw people say these are comparable to the HD600, but in closed version, which is something I would be very happy with indeed.
The first impression that hit me after listening to a couple of songs from the genres hiphop, pop, metal and prog rock, is that they really do remind me of speakers. I can't remember a pair of headphones they really remind me of. It sort of feels like a mesh of the Denon AH-D5/7K and the HD600. It has more and better bass than the HD600s, but which feels tighter than the one in the Denons. You could say the bass feels somewhere between the Denons and the Fostex TH900 (which is a few notches above the Shures). What I really love though, is that the sound is clearly without any hint of fatigue. That was important for me, and these headphones deliver. I also think I might've had too low expectations - the detail retrieval and overall fidelity of these cans are a good few notches above what I was expecting. In fact I would say they are at least on the level of HD600s if not better. Same goes for TH900s/Denon 5/7Ks and LCDs. It is definitely a big step up in terms of detail and airyness to estats, however at this level the details doesn't really matter that much to me. Big thumbs up from me.
Soundstage is OK. Not terribly important to me, but its certaintly servicable, especially considering these are closed headphones. I'm very impressed by the imaging. I like it a lot.
I have one "complaint" out of the gate. Well, its not really a complaint, but I can definitely understand people turning away from this headphone because of this. The bass is too much on some tracks. On others, its just enough. When I got into this hobby, I was a massive bass head, always chasing the heaviest bass. I realized that I was never going to be satisfied with headphones for bass (although the D5Ks and TH900s came close). Since then I've been more into clarity and "neutrality". But I've always been missing that hit of bass for certain genres. These cans do deliver a good bass punch for those genres, however especially on some pop tracks the bass overpowers the track a bit, creating a "boom" effect that feels entirely seperated from the overall sound. It really doesn't bother me, however for someone who was to own these headphones as true reference headphones, I can understand how they'd take issue with it.
P
As I said, these are impressions after a very short while of listening, with no external dac or amping. So we'll see if my opinion differs once I get it properly amped up. I'm definitely very happy with it as of right now.
