Jude pimps mrspeakers products hard - no doubt about it.  I still feel pretty duped that I bought into his claims/review suggesting the original AD's were among the best closed cans ever made.  I was contemplating buying a fostex mod from Luis (since I never could get the damn 1khz peak eliminated from my diymod), but I let myself get swayed.  Shame on me. 

I really wanted to love the AD's, but in retrospect, aside from the geek appeal of printed cups, I'm not even convinced they were an improvement on stock t50rp's.  There was just no getting past the weak bass response for me or the slightly peaky trebles - especially after I stumbled on a pair of cheap used ES10's, ran some sweeps on them, and realized that the ES10's, although not without their flaws, are just way better closed headphones than AD's at a fraction of the price.  Releasing the AD prime, that clearly was not well conceived or ready for market, less than a year after many of us received our original AD's, just stank of an ill advised cash grab.  All in all, the fact that Jude continues to push product for this company makes me very curious as to the details of the sponsor relationship.

It is very possible. And I will not say I would not do similar or much worse things if desperate. However, being desperate does not make acts of douchebaggery right.

This thread is very sobering.  No wonder I've seen such a discrepancy between the utter hype of Dan's headphones on h-f and the more reserved, sometimes critical impressions on other forums and even on reddit.  I'd rather not give any of my money to people who think they can buy their favorable reviews and censor the unfavorable.  I live in China - I get enough of that here already.

In China the government thinks that rabbits can convince people to return to a disaster zone.

I wish I didn't know what you were alluding to, but sadly I do.  I have many friends in Beijing (not far from Tianjin) and they say that when it rains, their skin burns and their coughing is worse than usual.  Yet on the news all you hear are stories about puppies saved from the blast zone.  Sad...