Before getting started with the actual preview I wanted to express my point of view on sound quality in general.
 To me only the absolute best I have ever heard is passable to the point where I can actually sit down, listen and enjoy.
   
   My main priorities are: proper timbre/tonal  balance, FR smoothness, resolution and dynamics, transients/harmonics and sound-stage. Those points are equally important for me and I absolutely will not tolerate something with incredible resolution but sub-par tonal balance or a huge sound-stage accompanied by the lack of smoothness. I am simply dismissing those sets and will never listen to them, even for fun. Another personal principal of mine is this: fixing one wrong sounding component with another wrong sounding one will never result in something that truly sounds right (example: fixing overly harsh sounding headphone with overly smooth sounding amp leads to a poor man's sound and is a big NO for me).
   Therefore all my reviews may seem like a compilation of negativity, well that's because they actually are and will be just that unless I ever get to review something that would better my own reference. Take it or leave it I simply don't see how to do it any other way.
   
   The subject of this review got me curious after Tyll posted his view on it on InnerFidelity. In fact reading that he thinks Philips had pretty much nailed it with the tonal balance kind of scared me a bit. I thought to myself, wow looks like we could soon finally have a perfect headphone. I ordered mine right away from Amazon and few weeks later received one of the first production units.

   Aesthetics, build quality and comfort are all great and I suspect durability will be just as impressive. To me this set looks and feels worlds better then HD-600/650, HD-800/700, DT-880/990 or Q701/712 to the lesser extent and pretty much any other competitor with open back dynamic design.
   
   Sound quality:
  I was impressed right away. Except for the slight tilt towards both low and high frequency, slight u-shaped tilt when low is actually tilted a bit more which many actually like quite a bit. X2 otherwise sounded pretty well balanced overall, neither too boomy nor sibilant. The only bad thing I noticed right away was they sounded somewhat Mid-Fi. It was very interesting why can't I even mistake such a well balanced headset for something of a reference level.

   I wanted to run to my measurement rig for answers but could not get to it for about a week. In the mean time I just tried to listen more and kept on guessing. The most apparent reasons were qualities of the driver itself as well as design and construction of the inner and outer chambers, possible coupling issues and or difficulty of the load to the amp. Honestly I finally decided none of that should have been such a big deal if frequency response was to be as flat as my ears perceived it to be at first.
   
   Either way I was very much puzzled when time finally came to do the measurements and what a relief it was for me to see the results, woooh.... my ears are still decent ;-). The same +/-5db I see all the time was still present throughout the FR range of this X2.
    As expected there was a 5db bump centered around 80Hz, then all is relatively flat 'till about 1500Hz, another pleasant +3db plateaued bump from 1800Hz to 2700Hz and after that I saw  all of my answers. Sharp, minus -5db dip at 3K going straight to a +5db peak at 5K then another -5db dive at 5,7K then a small platoe from 6.7K to 8K and then another platoe from 8.5K to 11K only this time it's a whole 5db higher and then going straight down to another -8db dip at 12KHz and finally last partial recovery to about 18KHz. What a bumpy ride up there;-).
   
   The a nswer is simple, Frequency Response still maters the most. Even when it all lays pretty much within one straight line (unlike most if not all other headsets I measured) and has a pleasant low and mid frequency elevations the fact that it is so bumpy in the end drops our perception of the overall sound quality to a much lover level. Things do really have to be smooth with frequency response no matter how sharp those peaks and dips appear on the chart they are still bumps and dips and in the end represent a fairly big issue.

   Conclusion: in my opinion this is a lovely balanced set and I can even see it dethroning the HD600/650 combo for some listeners. It definitely isn't as smooth as those Sennheisers but smoothness pretty much is the only thing going for Senn's when both are in stock form. X2 has much further extended lows, pleasant midrange topped off with well extended and fairly even with the rest of the spectrum high frequencies. Even though up top they are quite a bit rough but overall they still sound pleasantly right, just not reference and for me personally pretty far from it.
   
   I can see many people to really enjoy this set, especially if we take into consideration its price and build quality.
Have a good time listening.