Location, location, LOCATION!!
(Or position, position, POSITION!!)
Eureka!
Some actual progress here … significant progress at that.
I finally found a position that is much more comfortable and allows me to have the soundframes set such that they’re open enough not to touch my ears while preserving a satisfying (free-field neutral) level of bass!
And that is a big transformation in the overall sound of these things. Enough that I finally feel I can say a bit more about them - as the path I was on it was hard to really pay enough attention to what else they were doing, at least in detail, to appreciate them.
I’ll talk about fit/position first, though … and that’ll be brief.
The manual shows, and describes, how to put the MySphere on and how they should be worn. The illustration for the listening position it uses is this:
At least on my head that’s uncomfortable, so I’d been tilting them back and forth a bit, but all that seemed to do was mess up my hair more and change where the hotspots were (and I almost never get hot spots with conventional headphones, nor has that happened with the SR1a).
Then I saw this illustration on the MySphere website:
Yeah … a lot further back than I’d tried, mostly due to reading the manual … but in this position the contact points don’t get uncomfortable, the drivers sit much more completely over my ears, and I can open the soundframes wide enough not to be resting on them without losing all the bass.
Short version … for me the above position is necessary to get the drivers properly aligned with my ears. I had THOUGHT they were previously, but clearly not. And once you do get the right position you’ll definitely know, because it is a total transformation of their presentation as well as their volume and bass performance.
Now I feel I can start to properly evaluate the MySphere.