I enjoyed reading this. The journey to finding out what aspects of sound you value most and which ones are less important is a huge part of the enjoyment of audio in my opinion. It's almost like self-discovery in a way.

I also find the Sundara can have pretty harsh jaw pressure. For me, it's weird because some days it's fine, and I wonder why I ever had problems with it. Then the next day it will make my jaw sore after half an hour.

The xm4 are bass heavy where they need EQ down while the Sennheiser 560s is bass light. So the sound is polar opposites. Also the xm4 is closed back while Sennheiser is open back which for bass is going to be polar opposites as well.

Can raise low/mid bass on Sennheiser to a decent level but coming from XM4 wont get the bass heavy sound.

Any song off Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories album

Sorry for my newbie-ish question, but what is Bass Articulation?

We are propagating the cult of ZMF bro lmao 🤣

I was just agreeing. Double dipping if you will LoL.

yeah but so much re encoding 😩

That blurry mess? No lol

Had the original L30 (after they addressed the explodiness) and didn't really see it as a powerful amp. Didn't think the Asgard 3 was either, but no worse.

You sure you're not confusing their sound signature? Going from memory, Asgard is warm, a little soft in the transients, doesn't have much subbass, slightly rolled off treble, slightly emphasized upper-mids, narrower but deeper soundstage. L30 was more neutral, had a slight mid-bass hump, and while the treble was present, I remember thinking something about it felt lacking. Maybe they changed something with the L30 II.

I wouldn't say one is clearly better than the other but I preferred the Asgard 3. L30 felt a bit lifeless whereas I thought the Asgard 3 did a better job of conveying dynamics with more nuance. Better staging too imo.

Then again, I didn't love the X2HR either. To each their own =).

as a rule, open back headphones deliver, at most, a flat bass response. most have rolloff in the bass. if you're a basshead and want some 12db bass shelf, open backs are probably not for you (ones with better natural bass extension will probably EQ better to your liking, but why torture the poor drivers?)

idk if youtube does some other fucky stuff to audio besides opus, but there is no way youtube is even close to transparent. I immediately notice the difference when listening on youtube and i dont think im a particularly discerning person

Whe you use headphones with a particular sound signature, your brain automatically adjusts to it, and a deviation from that will sound exaggerated. The XM4 is a really bassy headphone, it actually has more bass than even modern beats headphones.

If that's what you're used to, your brain will equalize to that so that sound signature sounds like a neutral to you.

The 560s has linear bass. Switching to that from an XM4 will make it sound like all the low end is missing, and it usually takes a few days of constant listening for your brain to readjust, then the bass will sound more full again and overall the sound signature will be fuller and you'll likely notice more details in music youre used to. After that happens, going back to the XM4 from the 560s will probably sound like the XM4 is really bloated and congested sounding, with much of the details in the mids masked

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What did ASR notice? They only said they were surprised that Ether CX weren't superloud. Nothing else. If you had enough volume, you were good (you HAD enough volume... X2HR is a very efficient headphone that can be driven by a mobile phone, and Asgard is a crazily powerful amp).

Btw - term "driving" means having enough volume and that's all. It has nothing to do with the sound signature.

Hey yeah thanks again!

> I don’t quite understand how everyone raves about these when the low end is almost non existent

Because not everyone thinks bass = quality

Applying digital filters and other methods. I am a dsp engineer.

kinda makes me wish podcasts and audiobooks were encoded with OPUS instead of MP3. Usually they're mp3 and somewhere between 64 and 128kbps. Might sound weird but the artifacting bothers me even for vocal content. You could probably get both better quality and small file sizes if they used opus at say 64kbps. but i guess it doesn't make sense for compatibility reasons.

Actually having no issue with the weight, they feel verry comfortable

Yes because they are the best are imaging and sound stage. Excepting is hd800(s). The downside is they are usually heavier which isn’t good for gamers.

This gut sounds to me like he just bought his first decent headphones on friday lol

fair enough.

Meanwhile, here I am driving a Susvara and HE6se v2 from the lowly Asgard 3, lol. To each their own. :P

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maybe atmos was the issue? i think that should only be enabled on supported devices. i just played a round in halo infinite and could hear every step clear.