Phil's Superpower of Enthusiasm

1. I score bass, mids, and treble on a two part scale: 1-5 for quantity (5 being the highest), and A-E for quality (A being best in class, E being laughably bad). For soundstage it’s also a two part scale, with the number representing the width and the letter the separation within it. ↩︎
2. For comfort/fit, my scale is A-E with A being disappear entirely into the background and E being I want to tear my ears off to stop feeling these headphones on my head. I’ve never had an E. Editor’s note: I’ve now had an E: the Koss Portapro. ↩︎
3. More on this later. ↩︎
4. I’ve never owned another pair of Audezes, weirdly enough. I tried a couple of pairs early on in my journey and found them to be … not to my taste, back before I realized how good planars could be. ↩︎
5. It’s also worth noting that the Xbox Series X still lacks a USB-C port, in 2025, which means you have to use an adapter to plug this dongle into the Xbox. For a company that makes a great console, Microsoft makes some WEIRD decisions. ↩︎
6. Don’t use an active headphone (aka a wireless one) via 3.5 mm cable. ↩︎
7. I’m looking at you, Sony and Bowers & Wilkins. ↩︎
8. Eventually I got it to update via Windows, but damn. ↩︎
9. Also, bizarrely, you cannot change the EQ profile or move a slider unless audio is playing. I genuinely don’t how this was released. ↩︎
10. I’m just never going to remember how any of this works unless I’m using them regularly, and that seems like a miss for a headphone designed to be used in a single location. ↩︎
11. I am not a basshead, at least not anymore. I spend most of my time with active headphones turning down the bass, which is why it was so shocking to do the opposite for these. ↩︎
12. In an app that constantly crashes, and even at the best of times hangs up for several minutes before letting you actually access the EQ screen. 🙃 ↩︎
13. I still wouldn’t throw them across the room though, kids. ↩︎
14. I’m kidding.
    
    Mostly.
    
    Kind of. ↩︎
15. Full disclosure; my most recent comparison is the Dyson Zone, so take this statement with a well-earned grain of salt. ↩︎
16. Towards the end of my review I started getting a lot more drops, but I was also getting a lot of notifications on my phone and I still have Bluetooth connected. ↩︎

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