Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I've been on a quest to find a decent set of headphones with a microphone in them for meetings that I have over google hangouts which can last hours at a time and listen to some of my favourite music while designing the next big product release. This review is for the Sony MDRZX110AP ZX headphones that I purchased from Amazon.com. Overview: I really wanted to love these headphones. After all, 916 reviews with 4.5 stars across the board they couldn't be that bad? As soon as I got the headphones I spent the next 10 minutes trying to carefully extract them from their packaging. This is never a good sign but I didn't want it to influence me so I pressed on. Having the headphones removed and able to examine them more closely, they feel about what you would expect for a $20 set of headphones. I like the inline microphone and single multifunction button. The manual doesn't really tell you what the multifunction button does and how it's supposed to work but by trial and error I was able to determine that a single button click pauses and plays music, a double press fast forwards and a triple press rewinds. A long hold on the button calls Siri. The padding is not horrible and they are lightweight. They do press snugly against my head but I'm not sure if this would make them uncomfortable after long use. Last, they do feel somewhat brittle when moving them from flat to open position but as long as you aren't brute forcing it, you should be fine. My Background I am not an audiophile and my hearing range cuts off right around 16.5KHz but my background is that I have a degree in physics with a focus on acoustics and own my own home theatre speaker building company. At best, that makes me only slightly more qualified than the average Joe in testing headphones which are a completely different than testing HT speakers. I rely on two things when testing, an SPL meter with a frequency generator and my ears. The latter because what "sounds" right from speakers and headphones car vary immensely from person to person. It's like buying a pair of sneakers, and having everyone agree on the "perfect" pair. If that were the case, R&D in sneaker design would have ceased about 20 years ago. Tests: After burning in the headphones over a period of 24 hours playing a sweeping frequency at a moderate level, I tried the first of tests which are highly subjective. I do this before attaching any equipment to not be swayed by what the equipment is telling me. Bass seemed decent, but mids seemed really high and the treble seemed to be non existent (or extremely muted at best). I thought it was my ears so I switched over to a pair of headphones (Sennheiser) that I know and sure enough the treble was there. Next I listened for the soundstage using a THX 5.1 soundstage demo. The X direction was fine as it should be for a pair of headphones. The Y direction I had some serious difficulty picking up on - it was there, but just barely. But the Z direction, the most difficult soundstage to reproduce was non existent. I believe this is due to the weakness of the treble response. Next I connected my meters to see if perhaps my ears were way off. The results speak for themselves. You get a climbing bass response from 12Hz up until 225Hz. At 1000Hz, things start to go really haywire with a nearly 20db spike at 3686Hz. At 10KHz, you see things level out to about where the bass response is and then quickly taper downwards. From 12985.7Hz to 14056.2Hz there is a drop from 93db to 86db. Over a 1KHz upper range a drop of 7db is quite poor. In all, I will be returning these headphones as I cannot live with the mid range spike these headphones have. It really takes away from the highs and lows these headphones are capable of if the mid range was flattened out. My guess is that if Sony could sort the 875Hz to 10343Hz range -- that is flatten it out, these would be a decent set of headphones for $20. As they are, I cannot endorse them.