In use, the considerable weight telegraphs mostly at the crown of the head though not right away. It's actually surprisingly comfy. That substantial though padded metal bridge simply makes constant contact with your sensitive skin. Sooner or later it's liable to cause slight pressure irritation. The HifiMan and MrSpeaker convention of a textile or pure leather skull strap separate from and suspended beneath a metal or wire bridge is more comfortable. By adopting the Audeze recipe on mass and support, Final could limit user sessions to less than one hour. Final's locking cup connectors—two lateral pins enter the receptacle, then one turns in one direction only to catch—feel more reassuring than the HE-1000's which don't lock. As ever though, there's two sides to it if not more. Get accidentally caught up on something. It happens. With the HifiMan, you might yank out the 3.5mm pins. With the Sonorous X, nothing gives. Now one hopes the wiring itself won't. That is sleeved inside hard black plastic. This struck me as at least conceptually sub par for any luxury design. Cloth-covered cabling is so much nicer to the touch. Visually it's also not reminiscent of generic throwaway power cords.

Final of course make up for it with their richly gilded heavy-metal connectors. They supply a shorter 3.5mm terminated leash and longer version. On surface treatments, anything this mirror polished is greedily prone to skin oils, dust and sundry usage marks. To maintain such immaculate gleam requires a micro-fibre polishing cloth and fussy applications thereof. No cloth was included but should be. On fit & finish in the flesh rather than as photoshopped perfect hero shots, the Sonorous X lived up to their glossy promise. They looked every bit as posh as they did in the adverts. Living up to published 105dB screamer promise was full lift-off at 60% on the dial of even a now ancient 160GB iPod Classic. My RWA-modified 'zero output impedance' Astell&Kern AK100 showed 35 on its needle. Questyle's QP1R sat at 15 in hi-gain mode.

Final showroom opened November 2015.

I felt like a wannabe racer who shows up at the track with an ancient heavyweight of high-mileage Volvo 240 wagon, then smokes legitimate competition. It's nearly obscene but, this $5'000 ultra can spells 'can' in all caps with even modest portables, no high-octane jet fuel required. Hot damn! About their "precision instrument", importer Christoph Umbright added that "we often compare the Sonorous X to a Swiss watch which is made with the same love of accuracy. We can only produce four units per day because there are only two engineers who can actually build the raw drive units. Then it takes that much time and effort to assemble things."

Given this statement, certain items are inexplicable. 1/ the longer leash is 3.5mm terminated too. Will a $5'000 very big very heavy headphone be used exclusively with portable gear? 2/ no 6.3/3.5mm adaptor is included. 3/ nor are 4-pin XLR or dual 3-pin XLR cables to explore top notch stationary amplification with. 4/ if, as two mini-plug cables and no others suggest, portable use is priority #1, why a big bulky wooden box? Why not something more compact that's properly locked or zippered to be actually useful to stuff into a suitcase or travel bag like MrSpeakers' hard-shell Ether cases? Here Final's fashion and bling tribute paying dominates over full support for ultra-performance users. Requiring a 1/4" adaptor is bad form. So is not including one. Meanwhile the warranty card and serial# proof is a gorgeous etched metal plate. To my mind, certain priorities are askew. In the context of über performance and ultra clients, I want to see added a 1/4"-terminated cable, a 4-pin XLR-terminated cable and a dual 3-pin XLR-terminated cable. That's relevant when Final's extra-long cup connectors aren't standard to eliminate cables from competitors one might already have. Throw in a micro-fibre cloth to maintain the gloss. Replace the wooden display box with a round-cornered zippered hard-shell affair. That would cover all the bases as one should for this kind of cash.

Horsing around. Some equine racers won't give their best unless they're chased by at least one serious peak competitor. If not, they still win. They just won't push all the way nor set any new records. To get their very best means running them against true rivals. That's the Sonorous X. It sounds very good off a portable but then kicks it up into another gear when chased by serious stationary gear. The first and by far most important and exciting thing one hears then is that the X doesn't... sound like a sealed can. It's as lucid, laterally expansive, quick, unbloated, airy and spacious as a premium open-backed headphone. Race over. Uncork the bubbly. Cheers.

That's the short form. Some headphone connoisseurs familiar with the implications already have all they need. Others will want qualifications by contrast. For them, we move from my bedside system into an even more upscale headfi rig to juxtapose the Sonorous X against Sennheiser HD800 and HifiMan HE1000. Because that's what's required to race the Sonorous X properly.