Today I had opportunity to listen to Phonitor XE. It sounds fantastic, but I don't feel it belongs to the black background club.
People are saying it lacks bass, but I felt a contrary - sub bass is so strong, I never new AKG K712 can produce it down there. Maybe upper bass was just slightly missing (bass slam as it is usually called) but it sounded perfect to my ears, just the way it is. The mids (vocals) seem to be slightly pushed back in the overall tonal picture. The highs are very clean and precise. Really high definition of every single note. All that produced totally smooth, non-fatiguing sound which made me turning up the volume. I am very sensitive to shouty and harsh upper frequencies, and K712 is certainly not helping in that respect. However, Phonitor XE really put it under control. Nothing was rolled off, but high tonal accuracy and lack of any grain really made it smooth. Everything is under control, but yet very musical and engaging.
I was surprised with such amount of sub-bass. I think it somehow added some 'bloom' to the sound. So, that black background what we are talking about here, was not with Phonitor XE. I though it might be due to Zen DAC which was initially used as a DAC for testing, but then I switched to Phonitor's integrated AKM AK4490 DAC (DAC768) and it did not improve black background aspect of the sound. It just slightly added some sharpness, maybe clarity and punch compared to Zen DAC (I maybe liked more Zen DAC over that integrated DAC768 but not 100% sure...I would need much longer listening sessions to determine that). So something was always 'saturating the air, instead of having a void space'. I am comparing black background aspect with SR35 DAP.