Airpods Max are good compared to their direct competition, Sony XM5, Bose, but they're not amazing by any stretch. I think something like a $100 AKG K361 sounds better tuned, and the airpods max are all about the features and name.

The drivers themselves are just sort of crammed into the cup with minimal room, and DSP does all the work to tune the drivers to sound decent. But still they are missing a lot of upper mids.

I wouldn't pay full price for them

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.

I love the AirPods Max as a product.

Here’s a brief review I wrote elsewhere:

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Apple AirPods Max: These are both overrated and underrated at the same time. On one hand, you have non-audiophiles who may believe these are some of the best sounding headphones around, due to their price tag and the fact that Apple makes them. But then on the other hand, you have people people trying to write them off as merely a gimmick from a consumer tech company. Both of those views are wrong. Can you find better sounding headphones for $550? Absolutely. If your one and only concern is sound quality, there are better options out there. But these are absolutely audiophile grade headphones. They sound excellent. The sub-bass is the real star. It’s powerful and very present without feeling bloated. The bass is good, the mids and highs are decent, and the soundstage is pretty good for a closed back. I find the instrument separation is quite good and the dynamics are excellent, although the detail retrieval is merely okay. The best way I can describe it is that in a multilayered track, you can hear every note, but some of those notes may not have the kind of texture you’d hope for in this price range. The way I’d put it is that the detail is good but the microdetail is merely okay.

Of course, that entire description is missing half the puzzle. Aside from sounding good, the APM are wireless, they’re fantastically built, they have the best noise cancellation and transparency modes in the industry, they’re comfortable, and they have all sorts of other great features like ear detection, auto-switching, spatial audio and so on, if you’re in the Apple ecosystem. So if you think about these as a $550 audiophile headphone, there are better options out there. But if you think of these as a $300 audiophile headphone with $250 in awesome and highly useful smart features and convenience factors, these things are incredible. I highly recommend them to anyone in the Apple ecosystem who has the budget.

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Of the ~13 or so mid-fi headphones I own, the AirPods Max are easily in the top 5 for sound quality. For example, I’d put them ahead of my M50, SR60, and A900, but behind my 6XX, Grado Hemp, and K702.

And in terms of actual usage, the AirPods Max might spend more time on my head than any other headphone I own. Convenience really matters. 7.5/10 sound with great convenience factors beats 8.5/10 sound without.

I don’t like the default sound, but I feel like anyone using Airpod products with an Apple source like iPad/iPhone/iMac what have you is cheating themselves if they don’t use the included accessibility options to tune them.

I for one don’t like the stock sound too much, and agree it sounds a bit hollow. My ears definitely preferred the “Balanced” setting for the tuning, was a much more neutral sound to me and I think the Max definitely smashes every other Bluetooth/anc (low bar I know) otherwise

As soon as people start talking about tuning or eq’s, unless they have severe hearing defects, you know that only nonsense will follow.