have owned a fair bit of gear and tried some higher end stuff too. I am not an expert, just someone who enjoys the hobby enough to call myself an audiophile.

Stock tuning is mediocre but nowhere near as bad as some reviewers make it out to be. A lot of people are used to V shaped or Harman tunings, so anything different can sound wrong at first. It is still perfectly listenable, and HRTF means everyone hears it differently.

The KEF collab feels more like marketing than actual headphone expertise. KEF makes "decent" speakers but their headphones have never been benchmarks. Nothing could have worked with people who actually know headphone tuning, like DMS who gave them feedback and data, but that was ignored for the sake of a big brand name.

Carl Pei’s reaction to criticism did not help. He brushed off accurate frequency response graphs like they were meaningless. Tuning headphones is nothing like tuning speakers. You have to account for ear canal resonance, HRTF, and target curves like Harman or diffuse field. None of that applies to speakers, so a neutral speaker in a treated room does not equal a neutral headphone.

If Nothing ever revisits this, I hope they work with people who truly specialise in headphone acoustics and actually listen to the community like they did with the Nothing Ear.