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blargh4 t1_iu2l6ri wrote

Certainly not, but many high-end headphones have weird-ass tunings (cough, Audeze). In objective terms, you can certainly make a compelling case that they are better than the HD650s (which I am very fond of, mind you, and this is admittedly a silly comparison since they're completely different types of headphones) - the drivers have superbly low distortion for dynamic drivers, especially in the usually-problematic bass region, and to my ears they don't have any overly problematic resonances that would prevent them from being EQd to whatever tonality you prefer. HD650s are woefully subbass deficient (sans EQ, which will further degrade the bass distortion) so someone who likes bass-heavy music or booming movie soundtracks or whatever would find much to like about the APMs in comparison. In other words, you could get APM to sound like HD650s tonality-wise without them breaking a sweat, but if you tried to do the opposite, the HD650 drivers would be screaming in agony. Of course until Apple deigns to lets you set up a customizable system-wide equalizer you're pretty limited in your ability to tune them in their natural Apple habitat, which is very unfortunate.

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