A good friend of mine was kind enough to bring his pair for me to give a brief trial. Having seen all these praises here, I had somewhat high hopes for finding some undiscovered gem.
The amp isnt that clunky per se, I was expecting something attached close to the plugs and something much more cumbersome. The earphones dont isolate at all, comfort isnt too bad. Havnt gotten a chance to run around with them, but my guess is they are somewhere in between IEMs and regular earbuds in terms of how easily they slip out of your ear. Efficiency seems to be very high, I had to turn the volume a few notch down with the headbangers.
As for the sound, my prejudice was these are going to have very bloated highs, seeing someone mentioning about stronger bass than that of E2Cs. Well they do, bass is definitely bloated on the tracks where there is supposed to be bass presence. Not too boomy as seen in typical quantity-is-everything car audio subs :roll: but not too detailed to either, and still overshadows the other spectrum of the sound turning the whole music muddy. Headstage is quite compressed and doesnt extend too far horizontally. Highs arent too detailed, but somewhat shrill at the same time with a sense of tinniness. The main gripe was fatigue - I felt like taking a rest after 2 tracks going from E2C to these. Hiss could have been the main reason. Contrary to what was said earlier, I found the hiss very noticeable even while playing songs. All in all, I must say I am in huge disagreement with whoever said these sound better than E2Cs. More bass - yeah, but just not as high fidelity audio in general. Kinda felt like going back to the Koss Plugs, except the koss was way more bloated (before modding it anyway) and sounded congested like hell, it actually was pleasing to my ears. I have been very loyal to Sennheiser headphones, always end up preferring their HD-580/600/650 lineup. Not once I really knew what people meant by referring them to be "veiled". Now I am starting to see what it is; the more listen to the headbangers, the more I notice compressed, congested and distorted sound as if someone applied some "tunnel" SFX.
One minor annoyance I have also noticed was when you turn the amp on with the phones plugged in your ear, you will hear a moderately loud pop. Not the most pleasant thing, so it would be better to turn the amp on first.
I am not knocking the sonic prefrence of those who liked this unit; I cant never stress enough how we all hear things differently and harbor different ideas of "ideal sound". Plus this is not a full blown review of this product, only limited to few tracks with my iriver iFP-890 as the source. The chances are though, it will probably sound only worse going from this to i-pods, which are known to be below average for sound quality (or so I have felt personally upon trying them out).
There are always new "giant killers" in the market, and people love hearing about those. But many of those arent actually the giant kilers, although they might be ok for their price range. Think the simple principle of diminishing returns with higher price bracket, and YMMV with how sensitive you are to sound quality and what you deem as "good sound".Not that I was a big fan of mx500, but you would be better served grabbing those for better tonal balance and easier listening. So who would actually benefit from these phones? Headbangers dont isolate, so IEMs will be better for the applications where you need isonation. If you are more concerned about the aesthetics of the wearer and dont want to look goofy wearing full-sized cans, these might be ok. Not the prittiest looking but not slouch either. Yeah, they are only $20 so what do you expect, you might say. But so are HD-201s and they are rated very highly for their value and go for about ~$25 shipped last time I check the hot deals forum. Being full-sized phones they are, I seirously doubt they sound any worse than E2Cs, so there you have it.