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Beautiful! Looks like you and me used the same hifiman cable :) What are those pads? They look comfy.

Honestly I'd just carefully scratch at it with a razor blade until you see shiny copper, then see if you can get a dab of solder to adhere with the help of some flux. It might be difficult not to overheat the traces, but it's not like you can mess it up much worse than it already is ;)

The big trace to the right of the missing pad looks fine, maybe you can scrape the kapton off and solder to that? If the impedance still reads OK, the driver should be fine.

I would just read the reddit review, there are a few others out there now too.   "V shaped with forward mids" is pretty much nonsense.

M40x, but replace the pads with Shure 840.

DAC stands for Digital to Analog Converter. The 3.5mm out from your computer is an analog signal. USB is a digital signal. For some reason, you've connected both to your DAC/amp.   If you want the DAC to do its job, plug it in via USB and select its output in your windows settings. As you can...

  You'd be better off getting a pair of HD598's and the KetDirect boom mic cable for them.

  Multiple drivers in a headphone will not create surround sound. There isn't enough room in any realistic headphone design to create that kind of directionality. The Final Audio uses a BA driver as a tweeter, effectively. A headphone using only BA drivers would sound much, much worse than any...

  They're hidden by the dense foam that surrounds the driver. No need to unscrew anything. Pop off a pad, take out the foam and you'll notice 8 vent slots in the rim of the indentation the driver sits in. Keep in mind, these are only present on the Mk3.

If anyone's interested, it looks like there's now an actual, informative review on reddit:   https://www.reddit.com/r/headphones/comments/56h9ib/my_review_for_the_sennheiser_hd598c/

And just for reference, http://www.innerfidelity.com/images/SennheiserHD650.pdf   The 650 is practically ruler flat from 60hz to 1200hz. The M50x is visibly 8-10db from 30-100hz over its midrange response.   Everyone's ears are different, but the 650 is an objectively very flat headphone and...

Got a pair of ED12's after being really impressed with the ATE.   They're nice looking! They fit really well! The build quality is amazing for the $15 I spent!   Sadly, they sound hooorrrribblle.   They retain some of the bass extension of the ATE without being too boomy, which is nice...

Certainly, if you have a nice dac there's zero need to worry about it. In fact, unless you can hear ground loop interference, you don't need to worry about it, and there are far simpler solutions than any of those boxes.

You've pretty much nailed it. Digital is digital, and the idea of "decrapifying" at the serial interface level is thoroughly silly. The power rail on the other hand can pick up a ton of EMI if there's a ground loop, and pass that along to an opamp sitting next to it on a PCB. Those devices are...