Orthodynamic Roundup - Page 196

That manual seems to imply that different magnets effect transient response, I thought that only effected efficiency?

... a little bird says that they will be safely within the HeadFi community

Turned out to not have enough felt to fill my orders, so i went back to JoAnn for more.

Noted the existence of Yet Another Grade of Felt.

In addition to the 65% rayon / 35% wool usually referred to here as superfelt, they now also carry an 80/20 blend.

This stuff is thinner, and seems denser, and it's a couple bucks cheaper than superfelt, so i bought some.

However, held up to the light, it seems less evenly dense than superfelt. some parts let in less light than others.

It might work in double layers, or it might be worthless.

I'll mess with it a bit at some point. maybe I'll stick some in an envelope and send it to The Lab.

Edit: I will of course fill my orders using standard 65/35 superfelt. Some people get red superfelt, some people get black superfelt. I originally used only the black, and then couldn't tell the difference between the right and left sides of my phase 2 pro 30. So i bought some red superfelt to line the outer vents on the right side of the pro 30.

This would only be true if the diaphragms were the same and the holes in (and thickness of) the weak and strong magnets were identical. Admittedly the brochure doesn't go into those details, but if the better magnets allowed for differences on either of those marks, then the response could indeed be slightly sharper. Of course, this isn't to say that the sharpness claim might not just be BS.

Just shoved another stack of 120R SFI drivers out the door.

I have a bit more than half of them left. I've shipped to 5 countries and several states.

Do we know this for a fact? So the brochure's sharpness claim was just marketing hot air?

Yeah, I doubt it would be a very significant change. Thinner magnets might allow for more room for the diaphragm to produce bass, though. In principle, a driver with tiny holes and thick magnets should be measurably worse than one with a paper-thin magnetic mesh, but in practice the chance that a YHD-1 driver sounds better than a 2 just because of the magnets is slim.

good point.


What a near-miss the whole orthodynamic moment was. All that potential, and so few implementations that actually worked well out of the box. Half of the grand moral of our thread, I guess.


genau, just what I was thinking.

what do you think this might look like? A puck of felt glued to the back, and something else? Could be interesting. These days I feel like every headphone ever made was heavily compromised, so I think I could live with it.

I know this was a few days ago but I had fully intended to enter the portentous ortho world by winning this bid - I was stuck in a bus and couldn't get a wireless signal . ericj has been feeding me tidbits and I can say that I am feeling myself slide , so I thought I would just say my hello's and that I look forward to this adventure ..dB

I suppose that means that my time for procrastination over taking pictures of my YH-3 tweaks is over.

If i can tear myself away from the Bijou / YH-100 combination, I'll go take pictures. Nowish.

And yeah, welcome to our madness, dBel84.

Yamaha HP-3 / YH-3 Phase 1

Here we see the earcup with vent lining and patented Spring Normalizer covering the ball joint.

I used superfelt for the vent lining and leathery cheap sham-chamois for the Spring Normalizer. All this is doing is covering the big dish the ball joint creates. You could probably use craft paper. Or masking tape.

You should also be able to make out the sometimes-mentioned pins that hold the driver up.

In Phase 2, I am sorely tempted to chop these pins off, not using the Spring Normalizer, and laying a big disc of superfelt across the whole back of the earcup - increasing the vent damping a bit, and allowing me to use a new and better bit of foam rubber.

As you can see in the following picture, the original foam is roughly as sad as you find in the average Pro 30.



What should jump out at you first is the sheer amount of bluetak required to seal this baffle. This is because the nonwoven fabric that protects the driver is loose, held behind a silly paper gasket that is also loose. These will fall out when you open your YP-3 for the first time.

In Phase 2, I am tempted to follow in the footsteps of PMB and glue the fabric to the front of the driver. Or perhaps to the grille. This would allow me to use less bluetak to get a better seal.

The vent lining was made by starting with a disc of superfelt slightly bigger than the diameter of the earcup and then cutting out the outer 1/2 inch. And then cutting about a half inch of the material off one end.

The dual layers of superfelt are small enough to fit between the pins. This annoys me a bunch. Obviously in Phase 2, they'll be bigger, because the pins will be gone.

It might be worthwhile to try using a denser material - such as a scrap of microfiber polishing cloth - as the 2nd layer. I didn't like the yellow polishing cloth as the 1st layer. I always get the impression that it's both damping too much and flopping back and forth like a drum where it lays across the holes in the driver.