This is more of a general audio question, but still relevant I feel. I have had my HD 600 for about 5 years now and noticed channel imbalance sneaking in slowly. Now it is noticable, but not too bad just yet. I was hoping for more expensive headphones to not have these issues, but apparently I was wrong. Is this just something one has to get over, or is there some secret sauce to prevent this from happening?

I have now gone through some classic budget IEM recommendations as well and they have all had severe cases of channel imbalance in a very short timespan: Salnotes ZERO (about 3 months) Moondrop Chu (about 0.8 months) KZ ZSN Pro X (this one took 6 years to get channel imablance actually)

Will I just have to get new headphones now? I'm eyeing those Beyerdynamics everyone talks about (DT 770 pro).

EDIT: Also, I have found that it tends to be mostly the harsh frequencies which shift over to one side, so when adjusting the balance in some settings, it shifts all the other frequencies out of balance while fixing the 4000 - 8000 into the right position. Just something I observed.