I love the xM3, with my bass cuts it sounds absolutely superb, articulate and musical with plenty of snap and speed in the bass, but it HAS to have the cuts or it quickly becomes a sonic mess.
How did you manage to tame the bass, with Sony's app? I'd like to buy the XM3, but with default settings at least the bass sounded monstrous.
Edit: today I had the opportunity to listen again and play with the Sony headphone app.
Without the app the xm3 sounds extremely bass heavy.
In the app there is an eq which also includes Sony's Clear Bass adjustment with scale from -10 to +10. My preferred setting: -10
![Headphone Smile :) :)](https://cdn.head-fi.org/e/headfi/smily_headphones1.gif)
Anything more and the mid bass hump becomes too obvious to my ears (there is some extra bass left even with this extreme setting).
I was quite impressed with the ANC, actually. The xm3s were also very comfortable.
Then I went to another store (the first one did not have xm2s anymore). Tried xm2, but could not play my own music, so it is impossible to say much about the sound quality. The demo tracks did not sound bloated in any way, however. But the big issue (to me) could be comfort. I was surprised to find out that the xm2 ear cup openings are actually smaller than in my MDR100ABN. Also, I was not as impressed with the ANC as I had been when demoing xm3. But this was a different environment, after all.
So, give me a NC headphone with MDR100ABN sound, xm2 price, xm3 comfort and xm3 NC.
Oh, tried QC35, too, but did not like it much. The mids sound boxy and nasal, immediately obvious with classical music (or with anything acoustical).