The most realistic soundstage recreation I've ever heard from one of my audience tapes was achieved while listening via my IEMs. That said, I had a generic pair of etymotics and a custom set of westones and I've since let go of both. While they were great and I do miss them time to time, IEMs work best when you are listening outside of your primary environment (e.g. home in a quiet room) and I wasn't doing that anymore. One word of caution, the sensitivity of your headphones is much less (takes more volume) than any IEM I've ever heard, so you may notice noise that you previously didn't, and you may have trouble getting the volume quiet enough to listen to for long periods of time without having a channel imballance. I solved the later by using the digital attenuation function on my mac, but when I was listening on the go, it was much more difficult.