Hope everybody had a great Christmas
I know I said I'd post impressions, but after a week of listening to the 3Xs I've decided I'm going to return them, and I try only to write about products I feel positive towards. I'm returning them for a couple of reasons;
A) The whole reason I wanted to purchase a pair of IEMs was to use at work during unsociable hours. Now I've found out my shifts line up with the store's opening hours and since I'll be interacting with customers there's no scope to use them. I don't wear headphones to exercise either, and I prefer using full sized headphones in the majority of other circumstances, making their usefulness hard to justify £199.
B) I just don't enjoy using them. I have to preface this by clarifying that I am
not saying they sound bad, or at least not necessarily- my experience with IEMs prior to the 3Xs only goes up to the £75 Shure SE215s so I have little in the way of comparisons to similarly priced headphones. However for the past two months I have exclusively been using my Sennheiser HD600s and B&W P7s, and moving to the 3Xs there is a chasm fidelity-wise that I wasn't expecting. I experienced the same thing after using my Amperiors for two months solid then using my SE215s and it took a few days of solid listening for my ears to readjust to the sound characteristics of IEMs. I may well adjust to this pair too, or it might be a case that I'm always going to notice the shortcomings inherent to IEMs compared to more expensive full sized pairs. Either way between my current levels of enjoyment (or lack thereof) and their limited usefulness to me right now, I don't want to risk sinking £200 into a pair of headphones that I may never fully enjoy.
I don't want what I've said here to put anybody off trying or buying them if they think the 3Xs may be a good product for them, the reasons behind my dislike of them are very much personal and subjective, and I have relatively little prior experience with IEMs to benchmark them against, nevermind high end IEMs. I'd wait for reviews/impressions from more seasoned Head-Fi'ers to come out before making any judgements sound wise, if you don't get a chance to listen to them yourselves.
I'll most likely be returning them on Monday morning after getting in touch with UM's customer service. In the meantime, if anybody is after a pair of 3X and doesn't want to wait for new stock to arrive, I'd be happy to sell mine at the promotional price of £199 including delivery. I'll have to pay to ship them back to UM anyway, so I figured it would be nice to cut out the middle man and ship them direct to one of you guys. Feel free to drop me a PM if you're interested.