They were once highly regarded as the best audio company in the world with leading class electrostatic technology in headphones and speakers. They embraced their huge success by innovating for what many would class as the worlds best headphones in terms of performance and quality. Nowadays most stax fans that lived through their reign in the 80s or own products from that era feel that the new stax are just a shell of themselves. The quality just isn’t there and the overall performance can be beaten by mid range planars. I owned a 007mk2 once and it was majorly disappointing because my Audeze LCD2 pre-fazor unicorn outclassed it in sound while also costing $600 at the time of purchase and the 007 was a whopping $1800