Sony headphone consistency?

I just snagged a pair of MDR MA900s, primarily for use out of my phone because I'm a Marv-imitating group-thinking drone.

They have a distinct channel imbalance which is mostly rectified by positioning the right earcup closer to that ear than the left earcup is to the left ear. Doing this centers the soundstage but feels distracting and weird.

Sidenote: these cans are way more sensitive to placement than any other's I've ever tried. Their design and construction makes it very easy to move the earcups to a wide variety of different listening positions.

My question: is Sony QA such that I'm likely to get the same channel imbalance problem if I exchange this pair for another? A brief search of the boards suggests that I am. Constraint: I'm dealing with Amazon here, so I can't trot down to a dealer and try a different pair.

 

They have this funny design where 80% of the 70mm driver is covered to concentrate the bass into your eardrum. Therefore they have a certain sweetspot.
They also have some kind of resistor thing in there to make them capable to run out of anything. This adds tolerances.

Not sure if exchanging them would solve problems since you were able to achieve a centered center by simply moving them around. Seems to be a physical problem with your ears/head not being symmetrical rather than channel imbalance.

Sony doesen't screw around when it comes to matching drivers.

 

Yeah, that sounds about right. I'm not Quasimodo or anything, but the amount of tonal variation from simply moving around the earcups makes me think that a slight difference in pinna shape might be enough to make left and right channels sound different. Thanks @Lurker

 

Thanks for that confirmation, @Hands. Do you have any theory about why the MA900 is so sensitive this way?

 

I noticed some imbalance on MDR-100AAP when I tried them recently (pair that Ultrabike measured seems pretty ballanced tho). But I can't recall a brand that I haven't noticed notice imbalance on, from Sennheiser, over Audio-Technica all over to Audeze. Unfortunately I think it's a very commong thing in the audio world in general.