I find it very comfortable, with a minimally harder sponge than the factory ear cushion. The difference in sound quality is that the bass is more pronounced, the highs are a bit suppressed, which is fine for me, because at higher volumes I had a lot of highs and not enough lows with the original ear cushions. It's better in that the rim is thicker, so it doesn't touch the inside of my ear, so it's more comfortable than the factory ear cushions, and it also blocks out external noise a bit better. Long term I don't know what it will do because I've been using it for about 1 week. I'm not going to write about value for money, as this is my second more expensive pair of headphones and so I don't have enough experience to know if I can get better quality ear cushions for less. I had this experience with Beyerdynamic t5 3rd gen headphones.