Thumbs up for HE-500, for the price given it is clearly a league on its own, barring the HE-6 of course. Put's the Beyer's T1 to shame to be honest.

Actually the T1 had its fair shares of QC issues as well, just not heavily publicized due to its high cost and client base unlike the much cheaper XP series. If you read non-head fi related forums, you can see that Beyer has a problem with their customer service in Europe & Asia while US was still good.