[ZBoneCapone]

Hi all,
 
Finally ponied up and bought a high end headphone in the AKG K702 65th Anniversary Edition. From the moment I first listened to them, I was amazed at the sound stage and clarity of mids and highs, however, on some of my songs I noticed a "scratching" sound when there wasn't much going on in the music (ie just drums, guitar etc). I was running the K702s naked through my Macbook Air and thought it was simply the sub-par amp/dac that comes with the MBA. I ended up buying a Schiit Stack (Vali/Modi) and while the headphones do sound better with a bit of power and high quality DAC, I can still hear the scratching.
 
TL;DR I have a scratching in my K702s despite having an Amp/DAC combo and don't know whats causing it. The tracks that I can hear the most scratching are surprisingly 320 kbps.
 
Any help is appreciated!

 

[Creato938]

That's really weird, never heard of "scratching" on any headphone or speaker, there any many possible causes for this, that could be some detail in music lost during compression, artefacts during D/A conversion or even some K702 speaker characteristic, in some specific frequency, have you tried nay other high-end headphones?

 

[Aizura]

Either a hair is pushing against the driver membrane, or its just revealing flaws in your music.
 
A crickle in the membrane could also cause that kind of noise I suppose, though I doubt a brand new pair would have such imperfections. But then, it's not like manufactures give a damn about quality these days.
You might wanna take a close look at state of the driver membrane while looking for any hairs.
 
I hope it doesn't look similar to this: