[Samsung Galaxy S8+ Accessories] nosympathy:
I've owned plenty of high end equipment myself and sold it for many years and I don't agree with you. The brands you've mentioned are realistically bottom of the barrel as well.

Burn in, in 24 hours, maybe if you had a perfect track played repeatedly that could exercise the headphones perfectly. More realistically, after years and years of both selling and listening to high end equipment, you need much longer than that to truly burn speakers in. It's also not all preference, some people regardless of how much they wish they had an ear, simply cannot hear the same subtle differences as others. I've watched many a people over the years come in and want proof and I could give it. Back to back to back on sub $1000 setups to $50K setups and some people couldn't hear the difference. Some can. Some also go full crazy the other way and want speakers that can produce so far past the realm of human hearing it's silly. Like the guys who want a speaker than can go to 25kHz but they can't physically hear past 18kHz for example. Yes, you want the sound past your range of hearing, but to want it 7kHz past your realm of hearing is a waste of effort and money along with severely minimizing your choices (There are some amazing speakers out there that max at 21kHz.)

I also don't agree about not needing eq, as it's needed depending on the format of audio listened to. If the world was perfect, and everyone listened to only lossless audio, you'd want to have the most colorless possible sound available. Colorless amp, colorless speakers, colorless everything. We don't live in that world. You can take the same speakers, put them on 5 different brands of amps (big name companies or small) and even throw in a tube amplifier to really mix things up and play the same exact lossless audio sample with the same exact processor (pre amp) and get very different sounds from each amp (if you don't think so you are far from an audiophile.) This doesn't even count in the way compression on different audio formats work and what freq get removed or cut out (many forms of audio formats cut out the highs and the lows.) Sometimes you have no choice but to compensate. This isn't a downfall of the headphones or the phone itself.

My B&W headphones even need EQ adjustments on just about all my electronic equipment (laptop, cellphone, etc) to get a similar sound (will never be the same, but I want it close as I can get it) as they get running off my processor (preamp) into a headphone amp playing lossless audio where they need no EQ adjustments at all.

That also said, I agree you don't need to spend $100 or $500 to get good headphone sound (assuming you are not using a headphone amp, then you are wrong) as I have a pair of sub $30 headphones that so far have out performed everything else I've owned headphones wise (again no headphone amp) and are fairly famous for it.

all in all, I don't know that these match up to other AKG products, I've never really owned anything of theirs, but the sound is not half bad at all, specially for free headphones. I've never liked another pair of headphones that come with a phone in my life. I also cannot stand skull candy, bose or apple headphones.