Well so far, so good. Given them about an hour of listening so far. They give an extremely impressive account of themselves. The MDR 1As are really nice circumaural portables, I doubt you can get much better for something that plugs into a phone and does its job in terms of full-size cans.
The IE 800s absolutely stomp on them. There's nothing mush else to say, really (but I will anyway). A-B comparing is almost like night and day. The Sonys are really, really good in isolation. Compared to the IE 800s, the only positive in terms of sound that the Sony could be seen to have is that they're quite rolled-off in the top end and as such are easy to listen to. These IE 800s are mind-bogglingly good. I'm worried for my HD 650s and will hook these up to my desktop system later to compare (Dacmagic Plus and Lehmann BCL clone). I have a feeling the brightness of the Dacmagic might be a bit too much as it does a great job of 'unveiling' the HD 650s.
Microphonics is indeed quite bad, but everything else about the IE 800s works for me really. These remind me of my old Denon D2000s, but somehow they sound better. Mind boggling.