Going from hd650 to clear or utopia was also immensely hard to tell the flaws in them as well, even though nowadays my clear sound very tame...

Honestly for the flagships it takes like at least an hour to get used to it even having heard and daily drive TOTLs all day everyday.

Hearing them at a canjam or similar situation hardly count as having heard them tbh.

1266 at least the most glaring flaw is 13khz peak, with a 7db EQ down it's fairly close to flawless, albeit that has changed due to x9000.

But they're all good enough where once you get used to it, and without other flagships as comparison, it sound good enough to be considered flawless.

Imo ab1266+EQ, sr009s, x9000, LCD 5, are all good enough that feasibly I wouldn't be able to imagine how much better it can get without other flagships comparisons.

Up the headphone ladder at some point it gets extremely hard to hear any flaws tbh...

Sadly 95%+ of the people on the sub have heard an extremely small portion of whats out there and asking a question like this will mostly just yield hd650 = best headphone even though it couldn't be further from the truth.

As someone that's heard pretty much everything from 10$ to 30000$ it's certainly safe to say there's obviously improvements made or at least to some degree, more competitive pricing for the same thing.

HE1, HE60 and stax omega sealed the deal for state of the art best sounding thing to exist, and now there's a few more headphones that has joined the same performance level at a much more competitive price.

Same with Arya and focal clear, extremely competitive pricing (as of now), without them the upgrade steps would be wildly different for a lot of people.

Same with dacamps u can get 3000$ performance from like a 600-700$ stack now because of the competition.

In terms of absolute peak it's the matter of experience, u can say that the newer systems that's designed to beat/compete against the old best are better, at least objectively they're on the same playing field which means to some people they're better.

STAX x9000 and Warwicks acoustics bravura/aperio, abyss Diana TC ab1266TC, along with HE60/HE1/ShangriLa SR are the pinnacle for now, all of them offer different experiences of about the same performance, and you get to choose what's your preference.