Hi guys, long, long time lurker. I have spent many hours on this website but finally decided to join and give a couple of quick impressions from what what I hope is a budding audiophile right here
So, I've been searching around for some of the best headphones under $100 or so. These were on an amazing Amazon sale for ~$20 and I was aware of the cult following here on Head-Fi for them, so I grabbed them up. What a pair.
Now, I actually own a couple of cans. Right now the collection includes the HD201 (bass too light for me, a bit too forward mids, but amazing highs detail for the price), a Sennheiser PC350 that I use exclusively for gaming and works amazingly for that, A pretty new Sony MDR-V6 with about 100 hrs of burn-in on it (too shrill in the upper mids, really annoying, but incredible detail in the highs otherwise and awesome super clean, super balanced bass), and of course, the HTF600-S.
I have to say when I A/B these with the V6, it is easily recognizable that the Pannys are incredibly good for the price. The first thing I noticed was the very pronounced upper bass and even lower mids boost they have. It's so easy to EQ out that it's almost not even an issue at all, though. The upper mids are SO much more listenable than on the V6, but are just a little dark for my taste. The highs are surprisingly detailed as well, though I can definitely hear the peak around 10 kHz. It's not bad though, and even though my hearing drops off at around 15.5 kHz, they seem to reproduce the freqs higher than 10k quite respectably.
It's really hard for me to find a headphone I like. Most end up being too upper-mid heavy for me i.e. too shrill or sibilant or whatever you guys want to call it, primarily because I like to listen to hardstyle and metal and hardcore alike, and it's really hard to find a headphone that does the rich bass of electronic music and accurately reproduces distorted guitar without killing my eardrums with harsh upper mids. These are surprisingly great. They are making me, a poor grad student, want to sell off the V6 since it's just an investment that I don't really need to have made. Luckily I only got mine new open box for about $66, and they really do sound very uncolored aside from the awful upper mids harshness that I despise about them.
EDIT: Just some thoughts. Posted my questions to the correct forum.