You know that I don't cut Stax any slack at all. How many times have people said here that I was overly critical of the 009's? Add to that the Lambda lineup, the 007Mk2, their crappy stock amps and how am I cutting them any slack at all?
The angling of the earpads is a personal preference, just me preferring a smaller, tighter sound stage and not the diffuse one Stax set the phones up to give.
Also any comparison with Audeze has to boil down to them shipping out defective units. Stax don't do that and the channel imbalance issue sure isn't a defect in that sense. It can happen to any electrostatic transducer.