[thelostMIDrange]

but think about this.....isn't natural sound the goal of sound reproduction? and if so, how come it's seldom mentioned? most of the phones i've heard can't get the basics right, so they seem to skip right over them and go for detail, punch, awesome bass, phenomenal sound stage etc. i just want natural snare drums. and that is very hard to achieve I have found.

 

[liamstrain]

That's what I look for in headphones I used to mix and master. My HD-600 do this well. My 702 as well, with a touch of EQ. Even my 240 do this better than my Grados...
 
The Grados are more fun to listen to though. 
 
It's not so much the journey to natural sounding headphones my "assertions" comment was pointed towards. But my feelings on the sonic contributions of cables are well known (but it was also aimed at what I feel was an innaccurate picture of some of the headphones on the market).

 

[thelostMIDrange]

so we agree grados are not natural sounding but 'fun'. and I can agree the 600 is somewhat natural. at the very least it is 'even' sounding and from memory, didn't have alot of the odd sounds some others have. what are your findings with cable? does it need burn in? silver/copper have a 'sound' etc.........I think back to when I was searching fro interconnects for my turntable to amp and tried many cables at many price ranges and I was astounded how every pricy cable I tried turned otherwise natural lp's into odd sounding music. It's this kind of thing i'm talking about. I settled on grado cables actually. They made a short run of cable for stereo applications many years ago.

 

[liamstrain]

no, my findings (both from personal experience, and backed by electrical theory and experiment) - there is no difference between copper and silver of equal resistance (e.g. make the copper shorter by .5" and they are the same resistance again). No burn in... no magic, no difference between grades of copper. Any properly made cable will sound like any other properly made cable. 

 

[thelostMIDrange]

wow, now those are some controversial findings !

 

[liamstrain]

Not really. Cables have never under any controlled repeatable blind (or otherwise objective) test, been shown to have any effect. It is only under sighted listening conditions that people report and can identify changes. This suggests that while, yes, they do hear an effect, it is not the cable or cable material, per se, that is responsible for that change.

 

[thelostMIDrange]

I agree psychology is a huge factor in all this. I've been blindly listening to stuff for that reason. I consistently pick out silver vs copper though. and wood differences driver variences as well. combine those 3 variables and the variance is night and day but out of those 3, cable is much less impact.

 

[thelostMIDrange]

after listening to a dozen v4's all in the same burnished limba cups,i have developed 4 categorys they can fall into:
 
worn out blue jeans - dark, smooth, distant
natural
radioactive - like natural sets except upper mids are very colored and glowing
edgy

 

[t-crisis]

Warn out blue jeans aren't dark!! 

 

[thelostMIDrange]

right, should have been 'worn out jeans'  blue is just part of the phrase. it's the soft comfortable aspect of the phrase I was referring to, not the color.

 

[t-crisis]

You prefer the blue jeans or the natural drivers?

And just curious, did you find a "perfect" set, i.e. a set that had all those attributes or more than one of them?

 

[thelostMIDrange]

always prefer natural sound over 'wow' sound. I've only found a couple sets that I feel are real natural sounding in limba. and even they are different........ it's even harder to get natural sound from other woods.......these categories are for the driver/limba combo. Any other wood and there would likely create different categories, with the exotics at least 2 of the categories would contain adjectives like hard, strident and unatural, as well, as detailed, quick, punchy, extra-ordinary. and none would be blue jeans which seems to be a mag/limba thing...........  I'm looking for ordinary and natural period. These basics are hardest to achieve ironically. and getting natural snare drums over the range of my albums is the hardest thing to achieve.

 

[t-crisis]

The things a man would do for natural snare drums... 

 

[thelostMIDrange]

oops, said too much

 

[thelostMIDrange]

oops said too much