- The Sundara absolutely lives up to the hype and quality control issues are overblown.
- The Sivga PII with Sendy Aiva pads are amazing.
- The only Audeze headphone that I listened to and really enjoyed/loved, was the MM-500. I’d actually buy them. LCD 4 and 5 were… ok. The others were… No.
- I’ve yet to hear a Meze headphone that I enjoy. The only ones I haven’t heard are the 109 Pro and whatever the newer one is.
- I do not like the Sennheiser HD 800.
- I’ve never heard a headphone better than the Focal Utopia (OG).
- Enjoyment of sound is subjective, so my opinions don’t matter.
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While I’d say the Apple USB-C dongle is actually the best value in audio, I do have a soft spot for the Sundara. Yes it’s bright and crystalline in its treble, but every time I listen to it to remind myself if I like it or dislike it, it always falls under “yea this is pretty darn good” camp.
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Ety are the best fitting IEMs ever. These things are like a key sliding into a lock for me. My only regret is I waited so long before I bought a pair. And the soundstage is hardly “a spot between your eyes”. They aren’t any worse than any of my other IEMs on that front
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First off, amazing name.
Second, are you doing the Ety triple flange or the foams? If you’re raw dogging the triple flange, hats off to you. Interestingly, I’d say the intensely focused soundstage that feels like it’s right in the middle of your head is one of the unique selling points for the Ety. You just can’t get that any where.
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Hear, Hear 
ER2SE, ER2XR, ER3XR, ER4SR, and ERX
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Spicy indeed. Balanced has a point for IEMs more than anywhere else, because it removes the common-ground crosstalk that affects low impedance headphones the most. It’s basic voltage divider math, nothing esoteric. (Though I have to note most of the benefit is already realized if you have a 4-wire cable with the L & R “grounds” or returns kept separate all the way to the amp-side plug, even if it’s a single-ended plug where those returns end up connected to the same terminal.)
triple flange all the way baby!
The larger size wasn’t exactly pleasant to wear for me, but I could live with it if I needed to. The smaller size work so well I haven’t even been bothered to try any other tips - I do have some spinfits, but never used them on my Etys (they stay on my HEM2)
I guess the one thing that I initially found off-putting was the extreme sound isolation. I know that’s the selling point of them, but damn, they’re like wearing earplugs. It felt a little off being out and about and not being able to hear my surroundings. I got over it
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My spicy take is: The Fostex TH-900 is an S-tier headphone.
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Sorry, dont care because BASS!
- IEMs are trash, I’d take hd600 over most of them.
- Measurement breakdown in reviews are pretty much worthless for the average consumer, yes the reviewer should take them into considering when evaluating a product but literally who cares to see a reviewer point out the various features of a graph as if I can’t read. If you are into the hobby enough to read the graph, you don’t need someone to do it for you. If you aren’t, you wouldn’t care about the graph anyways.
- There is no “perfect target” in audio, variety is the spice of life. Harman target perpetuates an idea of this “perfect sound” (intentional or not) yet many people have collections of headphones that all sound different, and enjoy them all.
- Headfi > ASR any day of the week.
- Subjective terms such as “resolution” “soundstage” etc are very helpful even if their understanding may vary from person to person.
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Re: the hd600 conversation
You say the 505/550 have the same “reasonably right” midranges, so why would it dethrone the HD6X0? Obviously that means they aren’t in any way a clear step forward. BTW, there are many headphones that some have claimed to be the HD6X0 upgrade: ZMF atrium/auteur, for example. But those cost much more than the HD6X0, so less have heard and owned them. For a headphone to truly overshadow the HD6X0, it must perform significantly better, be priced appropriately, and, even then, still take time for consumers to purchase and evaluate, as the HD600 has decades ahead of them.
I can only offer my own anecdotal experience here, but as someone who entered the hobby with the HD600, only listening to cheap earbuds and speakers beforehand, it sounded perfectly natural from the get go, and is still the most natural headphone I’ve heard. For those that I’ve let listen to the HD600, they all (~5 people) heard no difference (Not to gatekeep, but I wonder how seriously we should take the opinions of new, untrained ears). At any rate, I subscribe to the idea that the HD600 is certainly not a novel headphone. Something like a Focal Utopia, for instance, is much more immediately impressive.
If someone was completely satisfied with the HD6X0 sound, they would have left the hobby ages ago, you wouldn’t bump into them on the forums. You even acknowledge some people do use it as their sole headphone. It is rare for any headphone to do that. You don’t see people leaving the hobby with their MDR-7506. And what is with this use of “everyone” and “universally”, as if that exists, or is the bar for the HD6X0?
IMO, the HD600 is a divisive headphone. It seems there are two camps, those that hear all its deficiencies (rolled off bass, small soundstage) and those that describe that natural sound. I belong to the latter camp, but what I truly don’t understand is people that try to convince others that the way they hear it is correct.
“Yeah no you’re actually being gaslit, you listened to the HD6X0 too much and you can’t tell a good midrange from a bad midrange anymore.” Like what?
TLDR: The HD6X0 is a good headphone(s) that works for a lot of people. It also doesn’t work for a lot of other people. Why are we placing expectations that it must work for everyone? There are so many other fish in the sea.
OK, I don’t remember if I’ve aired this one before or just been keeping it in the pipe, but I have to pile on with my biggest piece of IEM hate (warning: side-effects may include irresistible urges to veer into philosophical discussion):
I think one of the top 2 reasons for the viral spread of IEMs in recent times is that their closed-back earplug structure makes them very good isolators, and this responds very directly to the well-known growing need for separation from others / from society, aka. the loneliness or disconnection epidemic.
We’ve got too much consumer tech producing a constant supply of colorful and addictive audiovisuals, we spend too much time hooked up to it, we lose the patience and even desire to deal with messy and unpredictable and not-guaranteed-fun interactions with other humans, so even when we do go out of the house for things that can’t be solved in any other way, we still have to be as isolated as possible from those pesky ‘others’. Not to fear, IEMs to the rescue, which not only physically isolate you from others trying to talk to you, they even prevent that by their very presence being a signal of social disinterest, and better still, they even play music or podcasts, allowing you to stay hooked to the stream of supernormal artificial stimuli even when you go out.
The rest of the stuff about “no bro, you don’t understand, they actually sound better” I think is just post-hoc justification 
, the real reasons lay in social psychology and its interaction with IEMs’ brute physics as earplugs. Sure a lot of work has been put into their sound quality as well, but I claim that was a response by the industry noticing their rise in popularity, not the original driver of it.
(The other reason in the top 2, BTW, I think is the growing noise level in urban environments, and that’s the main driver for my own tendency these days to use my Jabra TWS more and more, and to make sure I never leave home without them. This side of it might be on a path to some partial resolution as quiet electric engines continue to spread, but there’s still a lot to be done wrt. food&drink places blasting their music at ungodly levels; AFAIU they do it to draw people off the street more easily but also chase them back out not too long after, increasing turnover and maximizing profit.)
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The Elex is my favorite Focal.
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Outstanding post, Master Yoda. Re no. 5, nobody thinks we should cancel book or movie reviews for uses of adjectives like “brilliant” or “clumsy.” Is there a danger of cliche? Sure, but sometimes that language is what’s needed.
You don’t hear soundstage with IEMs because your head isn’t wide enough.
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For what its worth, I think I belong to the secret third camp of hearing all of the flaws of the HD 600/650, but still—despite those flaws—acknowledging it as still probably the most well-rounded, least bad headphones that exist.
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TLDR: The HD6X0 is a good headphone(s) that works for a lot of people. It also doesn’t work for a lot of other people. Why are we placing expectations that it must work for everyone? There are so many other fish in the sea.
Yes, this is actually my point and I agree with everything you said here. Which is why I think you’re completely misunderstanding where my take comes from.
IMO, the HD600 is a divisive headphone. It seems there are two camps, those that hear all its deficiencies (rolled off bass, small soundstage) and those that describe that natural sound. I belong to the latter camp, but what I truly don’t understand is people that try to convince others that the way they hear it is correct.
I’m in both camps. I hear all of the HD 6X0’s deficiencies as well as acknowledging that its midrange is one of the best that we have. My take comes from the fact that there also exists a very zealous camp that states that no other headphones are worth listening to because no other headphone gets the midrange as “perfectly correct”. It’s this very zealous camp that has convinced many people in the hobby that if its not the HD 6X0, the mids are bad. And if the mids are bad, nothing else matters.
“Yeah no you’re actually being gaslit, you listened to the HD6X0 too much and you can’t tell a good midrange from a bad midrange anymore.” Like what?
This is not what I’m saying at all. I’m saying that there are some very vocal people who will say that the HD 6X0 is the only correct midrange, and so you can disregard every other headphone. And the consistent repetition of this belief has made others in the hobby, even those who might have that much experience, also parrot the phrase. Thus you get this entrenched bias towards the HD 6X0 that every other headphone has to compete against beyond simply sound quality.
Whether you agree with me that this very zealous camp exists and has an outsized impact on the hobby is a different question. I can only say that my experience in this hobby is that they do.
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I have not seen these people in the last like 3-4 years, where are you seeing them? This modality of thought pretty much died when HPHQ did. There are people who firmly acknowledge them as one of the best, or even the best, but I’ve never seen any of them say anything akin to “all other headphones are pointless/able to be disregarded” or that they get the midrange “perfectly correct.”
I do agree the 6 series is one of the only headphones that has an outsized positive bias towards it, but you seem very sure about there still being some sort of zealotry around them that, in my experience being terminally-online, hasn’t been around for quite a while.
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- So many people use HRTF as a catch-all excuse for their esoteric tastes. Why? Just embrace your tastes, no matter how weird they might be.
- IEMs will have much better “soundstage” if they drop 2kHz down aka Hifiman’s “house sound”. There’s literally zero IEM with that feature. I’m not saying HFM BS is a good thing, it’s just that nobody has given it a try in IEMs yet.
- Qudelix-5K is enough to power Susvara. I’m gonna push the Sus on Q5K agenda till the end of time.
- The argument of buying IEMs over TWS for longevity doesn’t work when people collect half a dozen IEMs and they keep dying from the tiniest amount of moisture. Meanwhile, TWS with IPX4 survives just fine being soaked in the rain. Sure, battery is a concern for everything, but all batteries in TWS you’d every buy in your lifetime is about the same as a single smartphone. Size matters.
- Audiophilia requires zero skills. It takes skills to evaluate something for someone else, but not your own. You like what you like. The fact voicing out opinions contradictory to the common perpetuating narratives like ZMF has great timbre, Focal has great slam, Stax has great resolution, Apple/Beats/Bose are garbage, etc. will be ridiculed is insane. That’s why I love hearing opinions on new products like Moondrop Cosmo because there hasn’t been a strong narrative attached to it yet, so every impression is wildly different.
- To end on a lighter note, Celestee is the best looking headphones of all time.
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