Hiya,
I'll add my experiences for what its worth.
I'm a long time owner of the Z1R, got it when I was on a trip to Japan at a Sony store.
I currently own and have owned a bunch of cans: LCD 2, 3, 4, XC, Elear, Elex, ZMF Eikon, Fostex TH series 900, and Massdrop variants, Grado, Senn, etc.
I've got to say the Z1R has so many haters, I've read so many bad reviews, and yet they are my favorite pair of headphones.
I've also had all sorts of amplifiers from 200$ to 5k+.
I currently am using the Z1R off Yggy gen 5 and a upgraded Wa22 Gen 2. The comfort and sound for gaming, music (compressed or not), is my fav.
If you're reading this thread and wondering if you should get a pair, do it.
If I had to sell all my headphones, this is the one I would keep!
I've had mine since they pretty much launched, which is over a year now. In that time I've used Lord knows how many headphones, and also used to own or still own the T1, T1.2, HD800, HD800S, LCD-2, LCD-3, LCD-XC and more, the MDR-Z1R are still easily my favourite headphones of the bunch, or of any that I've ever listened to.
They offer a sumptuous sonic balance, pretty much
the balance I'd been looking for, for decades. To summarise how they sound, they're essentially surprisingly wide soundstaged, articulate, layered and detailed sounding, but still slightly warm, bassy and full sounding at the same time.
If other popular headphones (HD800S, T1 etc) give you that ever so slightly colder crystaline studio like recording type sound, the Z1R's instead feel like they're presenting an atmospheric but life-like live performance like presentation instead. Ultimately they're extremely fun but somehow still mostly tonally and texturally honest (more so than my other cans I'd argue). And they somehow pull this off whilst being closed cans, having minimal noise bleed and also being easy to drive. An unbelievable feat of engineering.
Unlike many bass emphasised headphones, they're not too narrow and congested sounding, and unlike other V-shaped headphones, they're not too sibilant, thin or shrill sounding, and then unlike many analytical headphones that have really wide soundstages and imaging, they're not light on bass, body or emotion. They just strike that beautiful, atmospheric, sumptuous balance, which for my tastes and genres at least, is the closest to ideal I have yet found or experienced.
Also, unlike every other headphone I've listened to, I've never been tempted to EQ these in any way. Not even in the slightest.
Are they perfect? No. No headphone is perfect for all music or all tracks, but damn do they come close. Even where they're not an ideal match for certain tracks (which does happen on occasion), they still do an admirable to excellent job, but on tracks that they're fit for, simply put they mesmerise.
These are the headphones that got me selling off all my others, and I've never had that feeling with any other headphone in the past, since they all covered different bases, but the MDR-Z1R are such a great all-rounder that I just don't feel I need to keep so many cans any more. Even at they're
worst track pairing (that I've thus far come across), they're still decent to good.
Regarding some of the bad impressions, I honestly have no idea. Maybe certain copies are worse than others, perhaps it depends at what sort of volumes you're listening to them at, or maybe they are sensitive to people's ear canal or headshapes or something, I genuinely don't know, but I have barely any of the peakyness, sibilsnce etc that some have complained of. Mine are the polar opposite of being overtly treble boosted. Yes, they may sound detailed, but they're also still mostly liquid, warm, unfatiguing and generally completely inoffensive. I can and do listen to them for hours upon hours on end without
any fatigue, in gaming, movies and music listening.
Anyway, more than a year of ownership now, kudos to Sony. I should have known the ones who produced the legendary MDR-R10, would be the ones to stun me all these decades later.
