Recent content by evanft

Bro out here selling a museum piece. GLWS.

The one thing I will give Meze credit for is that they seem to be one of the few audiophile headphone companies that cares about comfort.

Bruh.

The 6XX series only really have three main weaknesses, IMO: Bass presentation, especially sub-bass. They do not extend as far as many newer headphones nor do they have as much texture as something like a planar. You also can't completely correct it with EQ as the amount of distortion present...

The answer is obviously an HD6xx and a $10,000 tube amp, duh.

I acquired another set of pads based on measurements I saw on Squiglink. I picked up a set of "SOULWIT Cooling-Gel Earpads Cushions" from Amazon for $20 shipped. Here are some very early impressions. Comfort/Build Clamp force is basically the same as stock. There actually is a brief cooling...

Is there anything stopping Apos from collaborating with a pad manufacturer and developing a pad with similar sonic characteristics that isn't made by Audio Technica? It's such a shame that what is probably Audio-Technica's best headphone is essentially limited to production run of the actual...

This looks like a kid threw some off-the-shelf boards into a box from Aliexpress and decided to sell it.

Did some more work on this. Capra Audio actually measured an HD650 with stock and ZMF pads, so I was able to use that as a bit of a reference. I didn't include the mid bass reduction as I wanted to get a good "stock" starting point for comparison, but basically it's similar to what I had done...

EQ is one of the most effective ways to get better sound out of your system. Find a headphone that's most of the way there, then tweak it to get that last little bit out of it. Much more useful than trying to chase tiny sound differences with amps or DACs.

If I want to give them the benefit of the doubt, I think they mean when the DAC itself has some sort of EQ feature built in, like what JDS Labs offers.

"Synergy" has become a new audiophile buzz word to handwave away spending tons of money on audibly transparent gear. Although I could see an argument to be made for caring about synergy where you have a particularly colored-sounding tube amp or one with a very high output impedance, but that's...

Tell that to the voices in my head.

I've gotten to the point where if I see someone with an expensive cable or other such nonsense in their signature I just add them to my ignore list and move on.

To expand on this just a bit, I think the difference between stock and ZMF is like the difference between listening to speakers before vs. after a bit of room treatments. Fundamental tonality may not shift much, but things like extra resonances/reflections are smoothed over, changing some...