Totally fine to think that! I tried EQing them beyond just boosting the 2k region and they just do too many things that bug me to outright recommend them. I don’t hate them though, I feel “meh” about them. They aren’t particularly offensive for the money but I certainly won’t buy a pair.

The detail bit is really what I can’t say I agree with—they have hyped air which does make things easier to hear, especially combined with the lack of dynamics to lessen contrast and thus make the delta between loud sounds and quiet background sounds smaller. But when a transducer lacks that dynamic contrast, it emphasizes things that shouldn’t be as obvious in real life, like conversations in a crowd during a live session. That technically is detail, but as a result, you miss nuance. This in particular bugs me in instances where the speed of the decay is unnaturally fast, as is the case with the XS. For example I hear a saxophonist playing a run, it’s fun to hear the pads of the keys press against the instrument and naturally trail off; with most planars, you can hear the pad hit the horn, but because they’re so “fast,” you don’t hear the trailing decay as cleanly as you do with a dynamic headphone. The compression makes the actual pressing of the key’s pad making contact with the saxophone easier to hear, but you then wait for a decay that ends too quickly. It’s a surface-level sense of detail.