It is hard to get a feel from the article how much better or worse these are than other headphones. For example, I have a pair of Sennheiser HD280 pros (closed) headphones and have been thinking of upgrading to HD650s (open). The HD280 is a very flat response (designed to be monitor headphones) with 32db of sound proofing... however the bass response leaves much to be desired, -10Db at 1KHz.