[gorman]

Definitely, yes, on the head tracking.

This is really good news for me.
Thanks a lot for answering my questions. Much appreciated.

 

[Shadowclash10]

I've replaced the pads, but the headband is the same material and has decayed. Anyone find a replacement for that? Pretty glaring oversight if Audeze has no solution for that and honestly, the Mobius has completely put me off considering other Audeze products because of this lack of support and product failure in under 2 years despite little use.

Yeah, I feel like mine has too. When you say decayed, do you mean flattened? Or do you mean actual decay, where it starts to flake?

For the headband, according to my research, you got a couple of options.
Sennheiser HD418 headband replacement (unscrew the screws next to the headband and actually do a real replacement), Reddit user confirmed it works
Senn HD418 headband cover
Senn HD518 headband replacement or cover (untested by anyone AFAIK, but seems like it should work?)
ZMF PilotPad (pricey), Reddit user confirmed it works
Vesper Audio Mobius headband replacement (pricey)
Dekoni Nuggets (not a headband replacement/cover, but could help anyways), Reddit user confirmed it works

This is how the ZMF Pilotpad looks on the Penrose (should work exactly the same on the Mobius). This is also basically going to be similar to how the HD418/518 covers should look (the materials and actual aesthetics will of course vary, but the "headband cover" style will stay the same).

 

[Shadowclash10]

This is really good news for me.
Thanks a lot for answering my questions. Much appreciated.

Just wanted to throw this in there, the headtracking is not at some software level or application-specific level - the headphones themselves have them built-in or whatever, so both the headtracking and 3D audio should work with whatever content you throw at them, period.

 

[Shadowclash10]

I had both for about a month but not at the same time. The Mobius is one of the best sounding "gaming" headsets out there, but that doesn't make it a good headphone in my opinion. I say "gaming" headset because I'm referring to headsets with a microphone attached, stuff like Turtle Beach, HyperX/Cloud, SteelSeries etc. It has a lot of the same gimmicky features that you might expect like "surround sound" or whatever they call the different listening modes to make it sound more realistic. They always sound terrible and the Mobius is no exception. It also comes with a 3D head tracking feature where it changes the angle of the sound depending on you moving your head left or right. It might be cool if you had a triple monitor sim racing setup but it's useless otherwise.

Bluetooth mode is slow and the audio quality suffers immensely. You wouldn't use it for gaming and if you wanted the best audio quality you would want to be using the wired connection. The only thing I really valued in the Mobius was the microphone, and even then I didn't like the placement of it. It was always in my peripheral view for some reason.

Before I get to the Sundaras I wanted to mention that I did compare the Mobius back to back with my old Grado SR80i and I thought the Grados sounded much better and they were like $80-100 headphones I bought almost 10 years ago. This, along with the $400 price tag of the Mobius got me wondering what my money could be better spent on. I was within the 1 month return period and Audeze kindly accepted my return. They were nice to deal with I will give them that.

Anyways, the Sundaras came in and they blew me away. They also blew my Grados away. You should know that the Sundaras are open back and the Mobius are closed back so just in that alone they are going to be different. If you are looking for noise suppression or don't want others to hear your audio then any open back headphone might be a problem for you. I ended up realizing that I preferred good audio and a mic on my desk rather than mediocre audio with an attached mic. Also, if I had seen the ModMic Wireless first I never would have considered the Mobius.

Something else to note is that you will probably want to get an amp/dac for the Sundara which is going to cost some more cash. I had an old Fiio E17 that I used initially but upgraded to Schiit Modi and Magni Heresy. Altogether though I would imagine the Sundara would destroy the Mobius in a back to back comparison if we are talking straight sound quality. I also found the Mobius uncomfortable to wear but the Sundara is like a pillow on my head.

Last things to note if you care: I upgraded to the Anandas and compared them to the Sundaras before returning the Sundaras (I'm returning the Anandas also). The Anandas are double the price but not double the sound in my opinion. Same sound signature but everything is bigger, faster and comes to life a little bit more. I also found them uncomfortable because they're like twice the size. I ended up with the Focal Clears which are spectacular, but if I had to do it all over again I would have stopped at the Sundaras.

1. I really don't know if it's fair to consider the Mobius to be a true "gaming headset". Sure, it has a mic attached, but so what? Does that change the core qualities of it? Does that put it on the same page as all these horrible "gaming headsets" from various brands, that have "gamer appeal" and sound horrible? The Mobius is also quite different from you know, a normal "hi-fi" set of cans, which generally have no Bluetooth, or wacky gimmicks. Feels to me like a blend of consumer cans, gaming headsets, and hi-fi cans. Also, I would like to argue that the Mobius probably has the best implementation of 3d audio, or whatever you want to call it, that I've seen on any cans, period. Now, you might not LIKE this style of... surround sound? I really have no idea what the proper terminology for this tech is, lol. But I don't think it's fair to call it trash, either. Yeah, the headtracking is really cool, but also really gimmicky and doesn't have alot of usecases, besides say, VR, or multi-monitor sim setups.

2. "Bluetooth mode is slow." Are you referring to latency here? "the audio quality suffers immensely." Sure, it's a bit worse, but besides the THX Pandas, the Mobius sounds like the best-sounding pair of headphones over Bluetooth, even two and a half years later. Like, period. Bluetooth will always sound worse than wired right now. I mean, it's an inherently lossy form of connection that can be really unstable, and depends alot on the codec implementation of both the source device and the recieving device. Bluetooth kind of sucks. But the Mobius's sound quality definitely does not suffer immensely when using it over Bluetooth. You dhould double-check that you're using it with a device that supports AAC or LDAC. "You wouldn't use it for gaming" Uh, yeah lol. When do you EVER want to use Bluetooth for gaming? Inherently high latency, weak connection, poor sound quality generally. The only time I would condone gaming with a Bluetooth connection is if you have an AptX-LL setup.

3. Interesting. Maybe the sound signature of the Mobius wasn't for you. I hope you tried using the Mobius for a while (brain burn-in).

4. Comparing open-back to closed-back isn't exactly fair, is it? Besides, it kind of makes sense. Sundaras are only $50 dollars less than the Mobius, but the Mobius probably had a lot of its budget dedicated to Bluetooth, the built-in DAC, the mic, the battery, the WavesNX 3D audio/HTRF stuff, etc. So, it does make sense.

5. Yeah, TBH I think the Mobius is pretty uncomfortable too. At least after wearing for an hour+.

 

[gorman]

the headtracking is not at some software level or application-specific level - the headphones themselves have them built-in or whatever, so both the headtracking and 3D audio should work with whatever content you throw at them, period.

Yes. That's how I have always understood it. But with electronics you really can never discount inexplicable incompatibilities...

 

[ralliart12]

Hi fellows, may I know if till now, the only way the Mobius can make good use of 5.1/7/1 audio like Dolby Digital/DTS, is strictly via a wired connection?
And, does the Mobius have means to connect to MacBooks with only type-c ports?

 

[Thomasphoenix98]

Yes and yes.

 

[Ultram8]

It's been a month I'm an owner of hyperx cloud orbit, yes thats not audeze branded but its absolutely same thing as mobius minus bt module. I noticed Audeze shows up in this thread so I'm hoping they read this.
Reading headfi & reddit on both mobius and cloud orbit/s I wish the build quality was lot better - issues with cup holders is inacceptable, I saw newer mobius revisions have reinforcements, hyperx dont have those. I'm really not picky, but amounts of people got into troubles is worrying and as far as I got hyperx won't replace and don't consider that as engineering flaw.
Second and the biggest question so far - the left cup having mic off switch, what was the problem to put battery&dac+amp swtich off button on the right? Battery is the weakest point as inevitably it degrades overtime. I would feel lot better if I could turn it off and amp headphones with an external amp, at least in 3.5 mode. Ad52010 isn't a bad amp but per audeze words any external one might fry out this internal one. As of the alc4042 dac - aint bad either, but man - this thing can deliver up to 32/384 that greatly exceeds my needs so question is more technical out of sheer interest on why would audeze shrink it to 24/96?
Third question - the alc dac supports own filters so I wonder if hq app (hyperx one is just a reskin over audeze's original) actually controls dac filter since there is a pause switching presets, or thats a wnx thing or even just an sw parametric on the app side? Would also be great to have built in parametric penrose has, as well as an ability to fully turn of presets as I feel "default" one is still a coloration over an actual driver response.

I used hex tool over both cloud orbit & mobius firmwares and this is where hardware similarities ended - they vastly different, I saw something that might look like eq presets but since I'm unfamiliar with structure I can only guess. Since its an mcu update which is a dac part - I guess that backups my claim that when using preset in the hq app we actually apply dac filter?

Anyways, I'm pretty satisfied with how these headphones sound, I do miss phase inverters in my old sony's but planars give incredible resolution and I dont want to go back

 

[FlavioWolff]

Second and the biggest question so far - the left cup having mic off switch, what was the problem to put battery&dac+amp swtich off button on the right? Battery is the weakest point as inevitably it degrades overtime. I would feel lot better if I could turn it off and amp headphones with an external amp, at least in 3.5 mode. Ad52010 isn't a bad amp but per audeze words any external one might fry out this internal one.

IIRC, the Audeze needs battery not only to feed the amp circuit, but to make all the command buttons work, and, most importantly, to apply the DSP (EQ) via the presets. If the phone went all powerless passive, the sound would be a lot different. Even when using the 3.5mm input, the analog signal is converted to digital, via an ADC, processed, and then converted to analog again - which is another reason to use it with the USB cable - avoiding the first unnecessary analog to digital conversion, since the internal DAC is used anyway.
The DSP and DAC are active all the time, by design, so it always needs a power source. What I'd appreciate is the possibility of making it feed only from the USB cable when plugged in, turning off the battery feed altogether.

 

[Ultram8]

IIRC, the Audeze needs battery not only to feed the amp circuit, but to make all the command buttons work, and, most importantly, to apply the DSP (EQ) via the presets. If the phone went all powerless passive, the sound would be a lot different. Even when using the 3.5mm input, the analog signal is converted to digital, via an ADC, processed, and then converted to analog again - which is another reason to use it with the USB cable - avoiding the first unnecessary analog to digital conversion, since the internal DAC is used anyway.
The DSP and DAC are active all the time, by design, so it always needs a power source. What I'd appreciate is the possibility of making it feed only from the USB cable when plugged in, turning off the battery feed altogether.

That's what I'm saying - I don't see any reason why not give an ability to fully disable everything leaving only analog way. The only reason as the uneq'd response is somewhat audeze don't want us to see)

 

[gorman]

Would also be great to have built in parametric penrose has, as well as an ability to fully turn of presets as I feel "default" one is still a coloration over an actual driver response.

You can check the response curve here: https://www.reddit.com/r/oratory1990/wiki/index/list_of_presets (scroll down to Audeze Mobius).

 

[Ultram8]

You can check the response curve here: https://www.reddit.com/r/oratory1990/wiki/index/list_of_presets (scroll down to Audeze Mobius).

Yea I did before and after buying, checking lots of graphs found on web. That ain't what I meant tho, I mean that due to dac always on - it always has a filter applied over real driver response I found alc4042 datasheet and read it has built in filters and I think audeze poke those through the hq app ui. So unless someone measures salvaged drivers diy'ing into pure analog setup we might not know what the actual graph is.

 

[KaiSc]

Yea I did before and after buying, checking lots of graphs found on web. That ain't what I meant tho, I mean that due to dac always on - it always has a filter applied over real driver response I found alc4042 datasheet and read it has built in filters and I think audeze poke those through the hq app ui. So unless someone measures salvaged drivers diy'ing into pure analog setup we might not know what the actual graph is.

How do you know Mobius uses the Realtec ALC4042 ?
I can‘t find a hint in ALC4042’s datasheet for audio EQ filters, page 10 refers to supply voltage filter caps only.


Here is a comparison of AUDEZE Mobius “Flat” preset vs. AUDEZE EL-8 Titanium, passive.
Their drivers share a lot, although housing is different.
Might give you a hint what AUDEZE did.

At least Mobius bass boost is done by EQ.

Red: AUDEZE Mobius “Flat“ preset,
Green: AUDEZE EL-8 Titanium,
Blue: Target response.
Raw response, measured on a silicon copy of my own ear.

 

[Ultram8]

How do you know Mobius uses the Realtec ALC4042 ?

Hyperx board is identical to mobius, so assume all chips are the same.

There you go. Just checked penrose there - now that thing looks different on the board while drivers look kinda same.

And here is hyperx one, one chip is missing (bluetooth) but even the antenna is there)

missing chip is some issc

Yes after bit of googling that issc is bt chip


Gonna leave penrose & mobius fcc teardowns if anyone is curious

 

[Ultram8]

AUDEZE EL-8 Titanium, passive.

Checked what I could find about el-8 (here is the vid from factory) and I'm not sure - isn't it bigger driver like from lcd's or something? Anyways safe to assume with mobius/hyperx/penrose audeze went bose way with eq filtering things within the codec or the wnx chip.