[Andrew_WOT]

Posted on the other MM-500 thread as well.

There was no larger headband option. We moved to a headband with 30% less clamping force. If you have a bigger head, you can purchase LCD-5 extended yoke rods:

https://www.audeze.com/collections/accessories/products/copy-of-standard-and-extended-lcd-yoke-rods

They should fit MM-500s. I'll make a note to update the webpage for this.

The MM-500 headband is specced to be the same as the newer LCD-5 headband in terms of clamp. The difference is that the MM-500 headband is spring steel and can loosen up with use, so if you have a problem with clamp, you can do things like stretch it over some books or a pillow or something overnight. Of course, be cautious about not over stretching, as that's not covered by warranty. The LCD-5 headband being carbon fiber is structurally rigid, and any attempt to stretch or bend may actually snap it.

As with all things, clamp is something people adjust to the longer its worn, and we can't please every single person's preference here.

Just looked at the extended rods price. Seriously, a 100 bucks?

 

[planar shill]

Just looked at the extended rods price. Seriously, a 100 bucks?

Eh, quality boutique products. In a way I agree that is very expensive for a part you might *need*, but I am also just happy they sell replacement parts at all for such low volume devices. Now if only I could buy replacement Audeze grilles.

 

[jasswolf]

No that's how I'd describe it. Keep in mind this isn't a thing that's well-defined, and while I can describe it in various audiophile ways, that's not exactly helpful for those trying to predict the differences with a graph. The community is still at a loss there unfortunately.

Would an apt way to describe it be the control over driver excursion in an enclosure largely bereft of added resonance and distortion? Requires high quality sources and a fantastic chain to deliver it accurately, but that seems like the separating (heh) qualities.

I can't help but feel like this is why timbre, resolution and a few other terms all wind up falling into the 'too hard' basket: they all rely on similar things going right from the design standpoint, just for slightly different reasons.

 

[Kevintj604]

Not sure if this means much and it's probably too early to tell but so far I haven't heard any overly glowing reviews. Quite the contrary with a few early reddit postings of people returning theirs because of discomfort. Having said that I'm still interested to demo them for myself and very excited about @Resolve review which hopefully we'll have this week.

 

[Resolve]

because of discomfort.

So, while the clamp is definitely a concern, I can confirm that the springsteel does give a bit when you stretch it out over a block or stack of books. Doing that made it far more tolerable to wear for longer sessions. Still, that is one area that I think Audeze could improve on with this design, as both the LCD-5 and the MM-500 are likely going to have fit issues for those of us with large heads, but I suppose that could also be said of most headphones.

 

[Andrew_WOT]

Not sure if this means much and it's probably too early to tell but so far I haven't heard any overly glowing reviews. Quite the contrary with a few early reddit postings of people returning theirs because of discomfort. Having said that I'm still interested to demo them for myself and very excited about @Resolve review which hopefully we'll have this week.

Yeah, and while there is no proper official comparison to LCD-X, if you check London CanJam impressions, people vastly preferred LCD-X, spare weight of course.
Perhaps casual music listeners is not the target group for this phone, remember Beyerdynamic DT48E?

 

[Kevintj604]

Yeah, and while there is no proper official comparison to LCD-X, if you check London CanJam impressions, people vastly preferred LCD-X, spare weight of course.
Perhaps casual music listeners is not the target group for this phone, remember Beyerdynamic DT48E?

As soon as this was announced I immediately thought this was going to be tuned to be a specific use case type of studio tool so I'm not surprised by the early impressions. Great that music technicians have a dedicated product line from Audeze and nice to see the brand expanding their line-up for different markets. Not every headphone has to be tuned for audiophiles.

 

[chargedcapacitor]

Would an apt way to describe it be the control over driver excursion in an enclosure largely bereft of added resonance and distortion? Requires high quality sources and a fantastic chain to deliver it accurately, but that seems like the separating (heh) qualities.

It's generally believed that the answer to understanding what "detail" is (and how it relates to a headphone's technical performance (TP)) can be found in the frequency response (FR) of a headphone. To understand this concept more fully, one needs to also understand how the frequency response is directly related to the impulse response, and therefore any sort of transient performance (also interchanged with TP in some audio circles) must also be tied to the FR.

The wrench gets thrown into the conversation when we look at a frequency response plot of two headphones that appear to be equivalent, yet one sounds vastly superior to the other.

So what gives then? Well, we often judge TP by how a headphone presents certain percussive sounds, like a snap of a snare, pluck of a string, tap of an electronic generator, or a strike on a wood block. When these sounds come across as separated from the other parts of the soundscape by large dBs as well as sounding "real", we often think of the headphone being "fast" and "snappy". These sounds can also be thought of as "transients". So what makes a good transient sound? This is where the relation between FR and impulse response comes in.

Might I introduce you to the world of the Fourier transform: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform

What can be deduced by using the Fourier transform is quite important! In essence, a transient sound is a pulse of sound pressure that increases in amplitude while there is an increase in time. What is important to understand is that for any certain signal input into the system (headphone), it's amplitude (loudness in regards to the other sound in the signal) is completely related to the plot of the FR. The more frequencies that are present in an even distribution along the FR, the higher impulse we get from the time domain response.

Essentially, every frequency that is presentable by the transducer gets added up to create the impulse response.

So why does any of this matter if both headphones seem to have similar frequency response?

It matters because the headphone with the "most" technical performance has characteristics in the FR that give the listener the perception of a louder /more realistic transient sounds.

We don't see this in the FR, because we don't know how to interpret such characteristics from the FR. Having evenness in the upper treble helps, but the evenness we see and interpret is not judged equally by the impulse response. Higher frequencies have more weight (not literally, just in reference to the amplitude of the impulse) than lower frequencies when certain sounds are played. So to properly judge the upper FR of a headphone, one would not simply mentally calculate the deviation that the average frequency has from the "target curve" (Harman target, etc.), but a weighted target calculation that puts more weight in deviations in the frequency response the further up the frequency spectrum the measurement goes, and with weights that are specific to human hearing that we don't fully understand yet.

So in short, there is no "standard" for analyzing the frequency response in a weighted way that takes into account how upper frequency response (which is responsible for the "fast" and "technical" sounds) can output an agreeable and realistic sounding transient sound. To throw another wrench into the matter, our individual ears and heads will alter the frequency response of all sounds we perceive! So if a headphone's FR is mismatched with our own ear/ head response, we will perceive a combined FR that we may not enjoy.

*Full disclosure: I am not an expert in headphones, this is just my explanation as an electrical engineer who has listened to a lot of audio engineers*

 

[LoryWiv]

Not sure if this means much and it's probably too early to tell but so far I haven't heard any overly glowing reviews. Quite the contrary with a few early reddit postings of people returning theirs because of discomfort. Having said that I'm still interested to demo them for myself and very excited about @Resolve review which hopefully we'll have this week.

I dunno, seems to me this one is quite positive: https://bloomaudio.com/blogs/articles/audeze-mm-500-review

 

[Andrew_WOT]

I dunno, seems to me this one is quite positive: https://bloomaudio.com/blogs/articles/audeze-mm-500-review

And we also sell headphones.
It's a decent, politically correct review that doesn't point to any flaws that you can see in the feedback from unaffiliated parties.
I hope Resolve will drop his soon with comparison to LCD-X, LCD-5, may be even Arya.
But so far I see that it's received relatively cold, I expected more enthusiasm around, almost bought one on release.

 

[LoryWiv]

And we also sell headphones.
It's a decent, politically correct review that doesn't point to any flaws that you can see in the feedback from unaffiliated parties.
I hope Resolve will drop his soon with comparison to LCD-X, LCD-5, may be even Arya.
But so far I see that it's received relatively cold, I expected more enthusiasm around, almost bought one on release.

Agreed. I did hear MM-500 at CanJam 500 and was intrigued, but show conditions are tough. One thing Bloom review mentions, however, is uncannily similar to what I experienced during my limited audition: "you can pull out each instrument or part to examine its textures or put it all back together in your head". That was spot on to what I heard. Yet despite this analytic quality, overall presentation was still layered very cohesively and musically.
Anyway, I don't sell headphones, just trying to decide if I want to fork over my hard earned cash to own this one.

I also look forward to more reviews and will try to have a decent, quiet audition at CanJam SoCal before finalizing my purchase decision.

 

[Andrew_WOT]

 

[Andrew_WOT]

Finally, the one from Resolve. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Love your reviews, always technical and straight to the point.
https://www.headphones.com/community/reviews-learning-and-news/audeze-mm-500-review

 

[jasswolf]

It's generally believed that the answer to understanding what "detail" is (and how it relates to a headphone's technical performance (TP)) can be found in the frequency response (FR) of a headphone. To understand this concept more fully, one needs to also understand how the frequency response is directly related to the impulse response, and therefore any sort of transient performance (also interchanged with TP in some audio circles) must also be tied to the FR.

The wrench gets thrown into the conversation when we look at a frequency response plot of two headphones that appear to be equivalent, yet one sounds vastly superior to the other.

So what gives then? Well, we often judge TP by how a headphone presents certain percussive sounds, like a snap of a snare, pluck of a string, tap of an electronic generator, or a strike on a wood block. When these sounds come across as separated from the other parts of the soundscape by large dBs as well as sounding "real", we often think of the headphone being "fast" and "snappy". These sounds can also be thought of as "transients". So what makes a good transient sound? This is where the relation between FR and impulse response comes in.

Might I introduce you to the world of the Fourier transform: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform

What can be deduced by using the Fourier transform is quite important! In essence, a transient sound is a pulse of sound pressure that increases in amplitude while there is an increase in time. What is important to understand is that for any certain signal input into the system (headphone), it's amplitude (loudness in regards to the other sound in the signal) is completely related to the plot of the FR. The more frequencies that are present in an even distribution along the FR, the higher impulse we get from the time domain response.

Essentially, every frequency that is presentable by the transducer gets added up to create the impulse response.

So why does any of this matter if both headphones seem to have similar frequency response?

It matters because the headphone with the "most" technical performance has characteristics in the FR that give the listener the perception of a louder /more realistic transient sounds.

We don't see this in the FR, because we don't know how to interpret such characteristics from the FR. Having evenness in the upper treble helps, but the evenness we see and interpret is not judged equally by the impulse response. Higher frequencies have more weight (not literally, just in reference to the amplitude of the impulse) than lower frequencies when certain sounds are played. So to properly judge the upper FR of a headphone, one would not simply mentally calculate the deviation that the average frequency has from the "target curve" (Harman target, etc.), but a weighted target calculation that puts more weight in deviations in the frequency response the further up the frequency spectrum the measurement goes, and with weights that are specific to human hearing that we don't fully understand yet.

So in short, there is no "standard" for analyzing the frequency response in a weighted way that takes into account how upper frequency response (which is responsible for the "fast" and "technical" sounds) can output an agreeable and realistic sounding transient sound. To throw another wrench into the matter, our individual ears and heads will alter the frequency response of all sounds we perceive! So if a headphone's FR is mismatched with our own ear/ head response, we will perceive a combined FR that we may not enjoy.

*Full disclosure: I am not an expert in headphones, this is just my explanation as an electrical engineer who has listened to a lot of audio engineers*

Great post, though I was already hinting at impulse response in my comment, so I agree with you fully.

The dream is that one day measurement techniques will be detailed and all-encompassing/robust enough that it accounts for how the acoustic output and environment of the headphone will reflect the culmination of all this for a broad variety of audio. The ultimate solve may be a smarter headphone that tweaks the driver performance, maybe modifes the the acoustic properties of the driver and/or enclosure, or applies a tightly-adjusted DSP and EQ based on the outside ambient noise. We're seeing the early elements of such technology be deployed via Machine Learning analysis and modelling, as well as related ANC protocols.

Exciting times ahead, but in the mean time we're now starting to get some pretty phenomenal audio tech in just about every price category as engineers start to do more of this.

 

[HBIII]

Got my mm-500s the other day and I love them. One thing I wanted to give is another perspective on the clamp force. Out of about a dozen headphones I own my mm-500 has the least clamp force, so either I lucked out on my pair or there are some BIG heads around here. The band is steel so if your head is abnormally large just stretch it a smidge. I really don’t think they should have made the clamp force any less or I would be concerned with it falling off my regular size head, it is already too loose for my wife’s head (and remember females are 50% of the population). I think they went with a clamp force a little the looser side, and also, if the band comes too loose there is no stretching it smaller.