I ordered some polyester felt cloth of between 1 and 2mm thickness to create a poor man's Gold version of my Ref II. Some tiny drops of glue on the black inner plastic ring hold it in place. Before and after measurement: Dampens the high end somewhat. Here is a measurement of the Gold I found...

Good question. I would like to know how the felt disks on the Gold version are held in place. I use a decorative ribbon of a fairly stiff plastic fabric: Cut to size of outer diameter of the retainer ring: Temporary attach with masking tape: With the cotton in place insert the retainer...

Of course with some sheepskin angled pads a luxury cable is a must. And a nice wooden box to finish it off... The 6k peak does actually almost disappear with the cotton damping rings. The 2-ply toilet paper gradually rolls off the higher frequencies from 200Hz upwards producing a down sloping...

I would love to use angled pads with these phones to enhance the staging. Can't find any in velour though. Something in sheep's skin would be the ultimate luxury version for me but I'm afraid it will not sound as good as velour. Anybody know of some angled pads that will fit?

I use the stock cable with my Ref II but it turns out it's not steel. It's copper as indicated on the box:

Bought some too. They look cool. If they arrive I'll post some measurements. In the mean time my best pads are still the HD250 Velours ( https://www.ebay.com/itm/254669296151 ) with some damping for the highs. I now use a double ply of toilet paper instead of the cotton disk I posted before...

Since I have a Fostex TH610 I figured I could use that to check the bass against a measurement by Crinacle. L&R average of my EARS (brown) and of Crinacle (blue): Disregard the high frequencies where the Fostex would require a different correction. Below 1kHz I'm within about 1 dB so it looks...

Here's the above measurement again and also the same measurement but using the general correction for over-ear headphones for the MiniDSP proposed by Oratory. His correction adds more bass than mine. This would mean my headphone would sound more like the Harman curve with bass boost: I have the...

Yes it's a measurement flaw. And no, it's not a measurement flaw. You sure are having fun tinkering with equipment. I've done a lot of that too with my stereo. I'm pretty new to headphones but this is what I understand so far: Putting a driver in a small enclosed space over your ear will...

Pads and tuning comparisons. The Wang pleater pads give a smily face tuning when used with the retaining rings. Without rings it’s much like the stock version. Too much highs. So some damping disk is required. Scottex or cotton will work. Here is the wang pleather (without retaining rings)...

I did some more measuring. There is a measurement of the HD540 RefII on Oratory’s website. I figured I could use that to check my correction of the MiniDSP but Oratory’s measurement shows an elevated bass response whereas I measure a flat bass response. The high frequencies match reasonably...

The Ref II's came without the felt rings bit do sound (and measure) a bit hot on top. Covering the driver like in the picture does measurably reduce the top end. The rings seem to need to be of some abortive material as plain paper did more harm than good. Stottex kinda worked but cotton makeup...

Turns out it's not a resonance. While doing the measurements I had the test fixture facing me with the right ear instead of with the front or back due to space constraints. So I was placing the left cup "in the blind". It turns out I placed it too low all the time. The placement gives rise to...

Interesting. I do use the steel cable. The left and right channel measure pretty much the same but during my measurements at some point the left channel had the peak at 6k increased. I figured it could be a difference between the L and R pad or the way it was installed but swapping the pads...

I recently acquired an HD540 REFII. Since I have a MiniDSP HEARS I figured I’ll try to measure the differences between pads and the effect of different tweaks. (I’m pretty new to all of this and more of speaker listener so any comments are welcome). The HEARS is not very accurate above 3kHz but...

Hello, Does anybody know where to source 2mm and 5mm black foam to to replace the front and back foam in an HD540 II. What kind should I use? Any recommendation on density? Thanks!

I generally don't like headphone listening but love these phones. Especially with some eq they are very natural sounding. Measured two of these to see where the dips and peaks are. Here's a "general eq" to get mids and highs flatter: 2400Hz, +6.0dB, Q=6 3200Hz, +3.5dB, Q=4 4400Hz, -3.5dB, Q=3...

They are the five master quality Gets/Gilberto albums. So both the expanded and normal versions.

Here is the Tidal master of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band "So it is" Album. Looks like it is played back without reconstruction filter and recorded at a higher sampling rate because the high frequency content is an alias image of the 22kHz baseband. You could play the CD on an Audio Note DAC...

Here are the spectrograms of the various Getz Master albums on Tidal. So much for "Master Quality" or "Authenticated". They are just oversampled CD quality files. There's many more albums like this...