Well, I hear that if the recording is not done well, a transparent headphone will make it sound rough. Not complete truth to this. If the track has sibilance, and if the treble is not smooth, the sibilance can sound a bit rough around the edges since it's not smooth. Smooth could mean many things I know, but in the iems world it means is it a bit rough and textured or smooth or thin sounding treble. How do we know if a headphones is transparent? Yes, some can represent better than other based on how we perceive the output of the headphones, but since headphones are transducters and they will vary in their characteristics, they will have different outputs. Some do have obvious flaws, but UERM is great sounding, and this talk is just nit picking. People should be happy with the product. Also, many think that the culprit of how the headphone output is goes all the way down to the DAC, but if you compare iems, there is much more difference than what people think a Sabre chip would sound like.
I find that the UERM has that characteristic of the HD800. Since there are various opinions on whether it is harsh or not, I take it that it vary depends on people's ear type and possibly there could be transducer differences. Some ears are more sensitive to certain peaky frequencies than other I believe as you have differing opinioins on certain headphones sounding peaky.
You got to test out the UERM with non-audiofile recordings, like badly recorded pop vocals as example to see how bad it can get.
