Demoing these babies on my incredibly high end work setup of ODAC > Vali. I'm pretty impressed. First thought is that this is way better at recreating the 2001 car audio slump'n experience of long excursion 15"s in the trunk of my old 1990 subaru legacy station wagon with some of my favorite hip hop albums than any other setup I've had. Feels pretty speedy and clear while having some impressive bass slam. Even on this setup I'd take them for fun listening over the ZDSE > TH900 for hip hop heads.

Driving it on a $120 amp is worth the $6.5k asking price in and of itself.

Worth the asking price to you?

Caveat: The Abyss I'm auditioning is modded so I'm unsure how the stock Abyss compares. They also have custom Marvey cables that have 25% more awesome than stock cabling.

Listening a little tonight with X-Sabre > 2A3 MKIV > Abyss with some of my own music. I agree with Marvey's assessment that this sounds much closer to a decent speaker setup than other headphones. I definitely prefer the HD800 on some music, but live and older recordings just sound much closer to real live music.

Subjectively, if I just had this single setup with the HD800s, I'd get the Abyss, too. The bass is to die for and it just does a lot right tonally. The speed is amazing (as many people mentioned). I agree the price is pretty high, but I really do like these quite a bit.

I've owned and sold the TH900, SR-007 MK1, and LCD-3 and I've spent quite a bit of time with the SR-009s. If I was in the market for a second flagship to complement the HD800s, I'd get these. As it is, after I move if it turns out my dreams of a new speaker rig aren't possible, I'll most likely pick up a pair.

Hm.. based on my time with them on a Cantata > LAu rig, the last thing I'd call them is speaker-like. They are very similar to Audeze headphones, but less wubwub more balanced signature. Still sounds like a hallway with speakers on direct left and right with not much in the middle. Even my poorly assembled speaker rig has a far better soundstage than these, and my UERM rapes my speakers, as do the HD800s, but not by as much.

Not that I think they sound bad, they are merely one of the best sounding headphones out there with my signature fatal flaw. People without soundstage issues ignore me.