WFang :
@alidan :
I know you said you hate on-ear products, but I would be very curious as what you would say about the sound quality of Grado SR80i (MSRP $99) or SR60 (MSRP $79).
I have the SR80i and for the money they sound better than any headphone I've had a chance to try out for any extended time. Comfort-wise, they are pretty good, sometimes at work I forget to take them off when I stop the music. They are open, but because they sound so good and detailed, I find myself enjoying my music even at very low volumes, and at low to medium volume, my colleagues at cubicle central can't hear them (or so they claim). Grado basically convinced me I don't need hundreds of dollars for great sounding headphones.
lets see here, a long time ago i had 20$ sony on the ear that got me by, a 80$ philips noise canceling that were pretty ok for the price, some absolute crap that was 5$ for 3 on and in ear crap i got as a gift from my than 6 year old brother, really nice and i used them because they were the only thing i had for an extended period of time, but they were horrible quality wise, the origional gameboy ear buds, which i still say where some of the best for just the fact they were free with gameboy.
than there was a razor headset my brother used, a turtlebeach, my hd 555's my hd 598 my brothers akg 2XX and a slightly higher quality closed headphone version of that.
of all the headphones, the akg 2XX thats open (they aren't mine so i may be getting the number wrong) are about as good as my 555 or 598, the closed headphones are easily better than my 598, but that could be the difference between him having a headphone amp/dac and me using a logitech z5500
barring shoddy construction, headphones can last decades and is the reason i'm willing to put out for more expensive ones, as for the gradios you have, i was trying to look up the size of the speaker, but i cant find it, but what i did find was they were the best for the price range, if i didn't prefer large headphones i would probably get those, kind of the reason i went sennheiser over akg, akg doesn't fit around my ears well, the sennheiser does.
but in the context of this product, which at one point was billing itself as 280-300$ they are not going to add in headphones that are 1/3 or more the price of the unit itself without also raising the price significantly.