Yes, there's that slightly recessed M80s' sound, which can seem a misplaced special effect if you try listening to classical piano or anything with a bright plucked sound (though you feel you've landed in Elysium if you auricle them after the LPs); comparative listening only reinforces the disappointment.
But there's also a slight graininess to the sound which bothers me just as much. They're not bad, but they're not worth over $200. I think of them as gorgeous imposters.
Originally when Val was talking about the M100s, he mentioned that the larger speakers would recreate bass more accurately, which struck me as the right idea. He also made an odd comment about matching to a pair of HD-600s, which he happened to have with him and mentioned they were "highly regarded on Head-fi."
I quite like Val and respect his attention to the customer, but I don't trust him entirely when he talks about putting out semi-audiophile headphones ("Head-fi meets the real world," in his words). I still feel he's approaching this as a DJ rather than an engineer and the problem is that he has DJ-idolizing taste. I remember his saying that other headphones sounded disorienting and alien to him when he compared them to the LPs. Unfortunately, most of us had the opposite experience: The LPs were the gateway to that dismal universe, not the headphones to which we compared them. Most of us aren't living in that soundworld.
Of course people are fascinated by the looks of the M100 -- looks and accessories are where V-Moda has the competition slain. If you were born anywhere between the mid-70s and the late 90s, a certain image of a matte metal dystopia with pointy edges and grim hardware was burned into you at a defenseless age, and V-Moda is the company that reached through the movie screen to snatch the headphones the tech in the futuristic club happened to be wearing (or, better yet, the deadly adversary who executed him). V-Moda is the company that handed those headphones to you, and the result is that they scratch a visual itch so hard that some customers are satisfied if the performance doesn't actually demoralize them.
Factoid is, I'm guilty of that myself. I love the idea of walking around wearing a pair of M100s. I'm just not sure I'll actually want to listen to them.
The only reason I'd consider buying a pair is because V-Moda's money-back guarantee is completely legit, and because you can see Val's at least trying to bridge the concerns of listeners whom most Tiestosterone-driven bass-obsessed enterprises don't care about.
I expect the Amperiors to come down to a human price in a year or so (as most overpriced Apple-ready headgear tends to do). I'll probably buy new portables when that happens, since they look decent and sound like normal studio kit.
Still, I'm curious to see or hear Jude's contribution to the matte black version of the VTF-100s.
