April 13th - First Ever New Orleans Head-Fi Meet

Here's the thread for the first ever head-fi meet that happened in New Orleans around 1:00PM central time today(April 13).

The equipment that was there:

One Brand New AKG K701s
One Fully Burned in AKG K701s(Over 500 hours)
AKG K1000
Sennheiser 580
Sennheiser 650

LaRocco Global Reference
Millet Hybrid Tube Amplifier
Rockhopper Pimeta
Little Dot Micro

M-Audio Revolution 7.1
Creative Audigy Notebook ZS
Apple iPod 3rd Generation


Primary goal of the meet:
To test wether a fully burned in K701s differ from a brand new set of K701s.
Method of testing: Single blind test and Double blind test

K701's legendary burn-in was tested during this meet. While we didn't have $20,000 amps or sources at the meet, we had a very respectable LaRocco Global Reference DAC/Amp.





Reference track: Petey Pablo - Freak-A-Leek

Both K701s headphones exibited the intermodulation distortion that I had experienced with my K701s.
The HD580 and the HD650 did not have the symptoms.

A good post pointing out the symptoms is:
http://www6.head-fi.org/forums/showp...7&postcount=82

For those that want to try:
The foobar EQ was:
0 -3 -6 -9 -12 -14 -14 -14 -14 -14 -14 -14 -14 -14 -14 -14 -14 -14

Careful, you might get addicted! This is my standard EQ for K701s.

The new K701s showed no noticeable difference from the old. The only difference was when vocals came from the left or right, the unburned-in K701s made them sound farther away. It was rather easy doing a blind test as both headphones looked exactly alike and during testing we had troubles identifying which is which. Looking at the ID# was our last ditch effort
I tried the test with both flat EQ as well as Bass Boost oriented EQ settings.


Why did the unburned in K701s make vocals sound farther away? My theory(and this is all just speculation) is that the unburned in K701s had the harder pads which translated into the drivers being farther away from the head. Farther away from the head = farther away sound.






I let samgotit(the other head-fier at the meet) try out the iPod+K701 combo that I've been raving about. I'll let him chime in about what he thought about this combo. For kicks, I also let him hear the K1000s out of the iPod. I've commented before that the iPod drives the K1000s to listenable volumes. I'm glad I was able to get someone else hear the exact same setup I was hearing. Lets see if I'm crazy or not.

Jul 2004, Oct 2003, Jan 2002

Wow that makes us a pretty senior head-fi group!