[Roller]

Like the title asks, I'm wondering whether driver tuning can be done at a user level, and beyond the regular damping, different materials for pads and alternate driver positioning relative to the original headphone assembly scheme.
 
The reason I ask this is because there are several headphones that are only differentiated by the use of "luxury" materials and driver tuning. If such a thing can be less than painstakingly possible by users, headphones could sound dramatically better, or sounding just about any way the user wants them to, when taking in account the drivers own limitations, of course.

 

[MaciekN]

Tweaking the driver is a great option, some really high end drivers are made by tweaking something just good. Dunno how it is with headphones but as they (most of them) use the same dynamic technology the tricks should be the same. So you can either increase the driver's mass or stiffen it somehow to change it's performance. If you increase mass you will cut HF at certain point.
 
I've seen a pdf where a guy improved the response of Tang Bang w4-1320 fullrange by adding dimples to the diaphgram in certain places, claimed to take control of membrane's material resonances. It was done by hand with no fancy eqiupment, nothing that can't be found at home. If headphone divers have the same break-up problems then you may improve them this way, though you would have to know where to add these dimples.
 
As far as I know (though I know little) applying something on membrane's surface is a common method in the world of headphones. You could try to spray a headphone driver with a laquer or ceramic powder at best and see what changes did it bring. I was thinking about this lately aswell, though we would need a rather cheap headphone with decent performance to experiment.