ok, my headphones aren't broken, at least. phew.

the noise-cancelling phones are designed to compensate for signals out of a low quality device, and provide somewhat of a bass boost in addition to blocking out surrounding noise. the old sennheisers are open-backed, so they sound a bit more airy; that's normally a net benefit, but it does lose a tad of bass compression out of this device. conversely, the noise-cancelling phones consistently distort the heavier bass tones when plugged into the recording pc.

overall, it sounds the way it's supposed to, with those caveats kept in mind.

i'm going to listen a little more, but i should be back on the pc by the end of the night.