First, I listen almost entirely to classical, with quite a lot of orchestral music, piano, string ensembles (quartets, quintets). To make sense of this, phones need to render the decay profile of instruments accurately, or they just don't sound right. I am a pianist, so to remind myself what a Steinway sounds like, I just have to go downstairs and listen carefully to a few notes. The way piano is rendered on the W60 is hopeless; instead of a sharp initial peak and rapid decay, there is a rubbery elongation (most noticeable in the lower half of the keyboard). The piano sounds vaguely out of tune, and slightly like a marimba. From the same source, the ancient 535s produce a rock solid and largely accurate representation of what a piano actually sounds like, although with obvious room for uncertainty about whether the precise colour of each specific instrument has been caught. Of course, one can question whether some parts of the spectrum are too forward or too recessed, but the overall sound is reasonably clean and precise. Unless a tone is sustained (like an oboe or an organ pipe) it decays quickly; both pianos and organ pipes sound more or less as they should. Not so on the W60. In the same vein, orchestral strings are a huge disappointment, because there is no crispness in detached bowings or pizzicato.
Second, the wash of bass and mids may be euphoric for some, but for me it smears out detail to an unacceptable degree. The sound stage is spread wide, which is a natural corollary of the low-frequency bloom/bump (and, to a degree, of the slow decay). Position and perspective are very vague, however. I cannot hear where the cellos end and the violas begin, as there are just broad areas of sound, rather than well-defined images. Where there should be layering, with a suggestion of depth, there is just a wall of sound. The treble brightness doesn't bring definition or air.
There have been suggestions, of course, that either the brain or the phones need burning in. But balanced armature phones don't really need much burn in, and the brain is not going to learn to capture information that has been deliberately blended away (although, of course, it has a damn good try, and that is why we are able to get musical pleasure even from $50 phones if we put in the time). No amount of burning in is going to quicken the decay. So, these are going back to the dealer, and I will start over. And, yes, I have experimented with a wide variety of tips (got lots of those). Also, to anticipate another question, I have listened carefully to a wide range of recordings, some 24bit and inherently very detailed, others dating from the pre-digital era. I did find the W60s gave a gracious patina to some of those old favourites, but at the price of some detail. On modern hi-resolution material, there was just not not much resolution.
