drew.haynes
100+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- May 22, 2006
- Posts
- 153
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- 10
FWIW rather than a soldering iron or clippers, I would use a Dremel cutoff wheel and sanding drum.
I hope no one minds my bumping this, but I just wanted to show off the results of my recent work. As I said, I decided to try just cutting out parts of the metal grill and using it as a sort of frame for the grill cloth (thus eliminating any reflections that must surely result from the metal and I suppose maybe some potential for distortions since the grill might still have been able to vibrate some?) There is still the issue of the fact that it has some ugly hot glue actually gluing the cloth into the "frame" but otherwise I think it actually looks surprisingly close to something professional:
BTW, I'm rather curious about something. Has anyone compared the soundstage modded HD555/HD595 to the newer HD598s? I find it interesting that most of what people are saying about the HD598s versus the HD595 sounds quite a lot like the very things that this soundstage mod actually affects. After googling around a bit to try to find pictures of the inside of an HD598, I noticed that it has only a minimal amount of plastic under the metal grill -- basically just enough to maintain full structural integrity. This really makes me curious. Is there any chance that the HD598 really is mostly just a better cased HD595? More importantly, if you do this mod, are you maybe just maybe, effectively turning an HD555/HD595 into an HD598 -- or at least something so close as to be effectively the same thing insofar as the value of the cost of buying the HD555 and modifying it? Well, not that I ever bought this HD555 for any reason like that (I just bought it on a whim because it was dirt cheap on sale and I wanted to try them out for their potential to work far better on weak devices like my handheld game systems and PMPs and because I was curious as to how the Sennheiser sound might suit me or otherwise fail to do so. I don't think a whim has ever panned out quite so well for me before...) It makes me very curious though as to how close these two maybe become with this modification.
Well, no doubt that has some effect on how they sound, but I wonder how much once broken in? After all, once you've broken them in, the clamping force should be less extremely different. (Or are there other things like the shape of the earpads?) I would never say that my HD555s were exactly the same thing as HD595s (heck, if nothing else there are different build qualities to the casing and such according to what people are saying) but it seems to me like if you remove the "surround reflector" foam you at least have something so close that it's pointless to spend the extra on the HD595s for most of us (not everyone -- even when a difference is less than 1%, someone will spend a huge amount to get it, lol -- just a good number of people.) Or do they really end up being that different even after being fully broken in?
Anyway, on the soundstage modified HD555/HD595 versus HD598, I knew they had different drivers, but I guess my real question here is: how different are these two generations really if you do this mod? Some of the stuff people are saying about the HD598 versus the HD595 sounds a lot like the stuff that this mod actually changes (for better or for worse.) And sorry, I didn't really word that right. I realize they have different drivers (if nothing else I can see a very different shape on the frequency response curves on graphs like that of HeadRoom's "build-a-graph" section.) I'm just asking: might this effectively upgrade an HD555/HD595 to being, let's say 90% of the good things of an HD598? It seems like the better soundstage in particular was one of the biggest things people kept saying about it and, if anything, this is probably even better still if we assume the drivers are at least this similar (since they have more plastic reflecting the sound than we end up with this mod.)