[DefQon]

  Do not get wooden cups. Wood is horrible in headphones.

Ya trippin
 
Do you mean by on headphones or in headphones? 
 
I've never seen wood inside headphones but I've seen it outside.

 

[takato14]

 

  Do not get wooden cups. Wood is horrible in headphones.

Ya trippin
 
Do you mean by on headphones or in headphones? 
 
I've never seen wood inside headphones but I've seen it outside.

Grado does it all the time. Using wood for the cups creates lots of horrible resonances. Ever wonder why Grados are so bright? That's part of the reason why.

 

[DefQon]

Well it depends on how the wood is used and the density of the wood. I'm no Grado fan so I couldn't care less about them. But wooden cup's are better than plastic because of the density and and pre-dampened surface the backwaves are absorbed more than reflected all over the place such as plastic cups. Alu and metal is worse but you don't see those in cup form and not to mention heavy in weight as well. Density of the wooden cup be it pre-dampened with wool, dynamat, dynaxorb, acoustic wool or cotton wool can also affect the sound quite a lot as well. 

 

[takato14]

  Well it depends on how the wood is used and the density of the wood. I'm no Grado fan so I couldn't care less about them. But wooden cup's are better than plastic because of the density and and pre-dampened surface the backwaves are absorbed more than reflected all over the place such as plastic cups. Alu and metal is worse but you don't see those in cup form and not to mention heavy in weight as well. Density of the wooden cup be it pre-dampened with wool, dynamat, dynaxorb, acoustic wool or cotton wool can also affect the sound quite a lot as well. 

Um.. what? You have it completely backwards. Wood reflects sound waves like CRAZY because it's porous. Metal is denser than either plastic or wood and therefore absorbs sound the best, but yes, most alloys are very heavy and unsuitable for headphones. Plastic is somewhere in between the two.
 
Case in point, the Sony DR-Z line of headphones. The DR-Z7 has die-cast aluminum earcups while the DR-Z5 has plastic cups. The Z7 doesn't have any resonances, but the Z5 does.

 

[DefQon]

  Um.. what? You have it completely backwards. Wood reflects sound waves like CRAZY because it's porous. Metal is denser than either plastic or wood and therefore absorbs sound the best, but yes, most alloys are very heavy and unsuitable for headphones. Plastic is somewhere in between the two.
 
Case in point, the Sony DR-Z line of headphones. The DR-Z7 has die-cast aluminum earcups while the DR-Z5 has plastic cups. The Z7 doesn't have any resonances, but the Z5 does.

 
No I have it right, you're confusing with what I said, you're talking about a non treated/dampened wood surface, I'm talking about pre-dampened (case in point R10 and speaker enclosures are good examples) surface. Porosity and density of wood grains plays a great deal, the more dense and porous wood surface the more backwaves are absorbed, reflection depends on the distance between the back of the driver port and the inner shape, think of it as a thick sponge absorbing water to that of a thin and light sponge. Wood type can affect the sound if you we went by your logic where wood reflects like crazy then you would see a noisier CSD plot from the LCD range of headphones and a wonky FR. 
 
I've built and measured speakers most of them from available kits so my experience lies from there, as well as modding and having a few of my woodies measured for differences.
 
Since there are so many variables with wood for headphone purposes mainly to do with aesthetics and reliability (cracking, heat treatment and humidity) can be expensive, metal alloy being expensive, heavy and harder to mill and fabricate, yes if done right plastic is a balance but also cheap, easy to mould and use according to what the application requires it of.

 

[takato14]

 
Um.. what? You have it completely backwards. Wood reflects sound waves like CRAZY because it's porous. Metal is denser than either plastic or wood and therefore absorbs sound the best, but yes, most alloys are very heavy and unsuitable for headphones. Plastic is somewhere in between the two.

Case in point, the Sony DR-Z line of headphones. The DR-Z7 has die-cast aluminum earcups while the DR-Z5 has plastic cups. The Z7 doesn't have any resonances, but the Z5 does.

No I have it right, you're confusing with what I said, you're talking about a non treated/dampened wood surface, I'm talking about pre-dampened (case in point R10 and speaker enclosures are good examples) surface. Porosity and density of wood grains plays a great deal, the more dense and porous wood surface the more backwaves are absorbed, reflection depends on the distance between the back of the driver port and the inner shape, think of it as a thick sponge absorbing water to that of a thin and light sponge. Wood type can affect the sound if you we went by your logic where wood reflects like crazy then you would see a noisier CSD plot from the LCD range of headphones and a wonky FR. 

I've built and measured speakers most of them from available kits so my experience lies from there, as well as modding and having a few of my woodies measured for differences.

Since there are so many variables with wood for headphone purposes mainly to do with aesthetics and reliability (cracking, heat treatment and humidity) can be expensive, metal alloy being expensive, heavy and harder to mill and fabricate, yes if done right plastic is a balance but also cheap, easy to mould and use according to what the application requires it of.

Uh.. what? The R10 uses a very specific wood with a very specific shape to control resonance behavior. It doesn't have damping and the wood isn't "treated" in any specific way. It's using resonances to its advantage by altering the FR to add euphony and increase soundstage performance. The R10 is the only headphone of its kind; the level of engineering that was put into making it hasn't been seen ever since, making it impossible to compare it with any other headphone.

Using the LCD line as backup evidence is complete bull. Those headphones do not have earcups, the wood is completely decorative, it's literally a sleeve that goes around the driver, which incidentally is encased in metal. The driver just floats there, suspended off your head by the pads.

Even if everything you said is true, I highly doubt the FA-003Ti replacement cups are treated or dampened in any way; almost nobody uses damping in headphones anymore, they just slap drivers into the cups and call it good. Which is why 99% of all closed cans on the market can't even come close to matching open designs, especially regarding soundstage performance. In actuality if you made the best closed headphone you could make, said headphone would absolutely trounce an open design of the same caliber. It's just that no one ever does it because open is easier.

 

[DefQon]

Uh.. what? The R10 uses a very specific wood with a very specific shape to control resonance behavior. It doesn't have damping and the wood isn't "treated" in any specific way. It's using resonances to its advantage by altering the FR to add euphony and increase soundstage performance. The R10 is the only headphone of its kind; the level of engineering that was put into making it hasn't been seen ever since, making it impossible to compare it with any other headphone.

Using the LCD line as backup evidence is complete bull. Those headphones do not have earcups, the wood is completely decorative, it's literally a sleeve that goes around the driver, which incidentally is encased in metal. The driver just floats there, suspended off your head by the pads.

Even if everything you said is true, I highly doubt the FA-003Ti replacement cups are treated or dampened in any way; almost nobody uses damping in headphones anymore, they just slap drivers into the cups and call it good. Which is why 99% of all closed cans on the market can't even come close to matching open designs, especially regarding soundstage performance. In actuality if you made the best closed headphone you could make, said headphone would absolutely trounce an open design of the same caliber. It's just that no one ever does it because open is easier.

Sigh you need to learn a thing or two young grasshopper as you obviously don't know what you're talking about. Ok first of all the R10 does have dampening as does the CD3k both of which I've held in my hands and listened with me owning the latter. It uses white cotton wool as dampening, yes it's chamber design is of it's own kind but that doesn't mean any other company can't engineer it again one day. Every piece of wood is treated for whatever purpose it is going for, look up "wood treatment", no idiot company is going use fresh, raw butched lumber wood, pick a random piece, mill it down and use it for furniture, headphones or speaker enclosures, some do, most don't but it depends on what the end application is and where its going (indoor, outdoor).
 
Second of all saying using wooden cup's has high resonances is just plain bs, 90% of the time headphones using lighter material's as the back end cup such as plastic has more resonance than wood, don't believe me look up CSD plots for those headphones, metal grills in open design again resonant, these attributes are mostly not identifiable by FR charts, CSD plots and waterfalls reveal these issues. 
 
With the LCD2's, you said wood in headphones you didn't specify where 

 so I made the assumption with my previous post that you were talking about wooden cups. Have you ever owned, listened or pulled apart any of the LCD2's? I don't think so, the wood is not just there for decorative purposes if Audeze wanted to do that they could've just made a wooden O-ring to sleeve around an inner metal ring or driver support which Hifiman did with there unreliable HE-5's that cracked like no tomorrow. Everything has an affect to each thing. You want decorative wood? The LE10's is your answer to that.
 
What I've stated is in general and is what should be done and has been done before, there is so much you can do with the design of a headphone and this applies to speakers as well, you can tune the enclosure/headphone housing/cup to suit whatever FR you're targetting for what the transducer's are most capable of in that design, there is so little you can do with tuning transducers especially dynamics, yes planars and ESL size of driver matters but at the end of the day you're not strapping bare drivers to your ears and calling it a final product, so using the right material, shape, distance of drivers, angled or flat, open, semi open and especially earpads these all affect the final sound and FR. Not all wooden cup headphones don't have dampening, I know for a fact that the Denon D2/5/7k range didn't which is why Mark made the mods posted here half a decade ago to dampen the drivers and wooden cups to get better sound using dynamat and dynaxorb, the FA-002/03 and Ti cups have something called steps which is milled out grove steps around the curvature of the inner cups, I've spoken to Dimitri before who works for FA and his sent me a diagram (subjective) one of differences in sound every cup they have offer's, this includes the 5 and 8 stepped cups, this is a form of dampening to elevate or attenuate the FR for a specific target or purpose, it's a common misconception to think dampening as adding wool to a surface. 
 
Also comparing closed design to open design is apples and bananas comparison and I don't know why you brought that into the argument which the original statement you made was "wood resonate like crazy". As with the last point that you've said "almost nobody uses damping in headphones anymore, they just slap drivers into the cups and call it good" yeah this is true and that's why so many of those headphones are absolute crap when it comes to objective scale measurement. But you should know this by now.

 

[takato14]

 

Uh.. what? The R10 uses a very specific wood with a very specific shape to control resonance behavior. It doesn't have damping and the wood isn't "treated" in any specific way. It's using resonances to its advantage by altering the FR to add euphony and increase soundstage performance. The R10 is the only headphone of its kind; the level of engineering that was put into making it hasn't been seen ever since, making it impossible to compare it with any other headphone.

Using the LCD line as backup evidence is complete bull. Those headphones do not have earcups, the wood is completely decorative, it's literally a sleeve that goes around the driver, which incidentally is encased in metal. The driver just floats there, suspended off your head by the pads.

Even if everything you said is true, I highly doubt the FA-003Ti replacement cups are treated or dampened in any way; almost nobody uses damping in headphones anymore, they just slap drivers into the cups and call it good. Which is why 99% of all closed cans on the market can't even come close to matching open designs, especially regarding soundstage performance. In actuality if you made the best closed headphone you could make, said headphone would absolutely trounce an open design of the same caliber. It's just that no one ever does it because open is easier.

Sigh you need to learn a thing or two young grasshopper as you obviously don't know what you're talking about. Ok first of all the R10 does have dampening as does the CD3k both of which I've held in my hands and listened with me owning the latter. It uses white cotton wool as dampening, yes it's chamber design is of it's own kind but that doesn't mean any other company can't engineer it again one day. Every piece of wood is treated for whatever purpose it is going for, look up "wood treatment", no idiot company is going use fresh, raw butched lumber wood, pick a random piece, mill it down and use it for furniture, headphones or speaker enclosures, some do, most don't but it depends on what the end application is and where its going (indoor, outdoor).
 
Second of all saying using wooden cup's has high resonances is just plain bs, 90% of the time headphones using lighter material's as the back end cup such as plastic has more resonance than wood, don't believe me look up CSD plots for those headphones, metal grills in open design again resonant, these attributes are mostly not identifiable by FR charts, CSD plots and waterfalls reveal these issues. 
 
With the LCD2's, you said wood in headphones you didn't specify where 

 so I made the assumption with my previous post that you were talking about wooden cups. Have you ever owned, listened or pulled apart any of the LCD2's? I don't think so, the wood is not just there for decorative purposes if Audeze wanted to do that they could've just made a wooden O-ring to sleeve around an inner metal ring or driver support which Hifiman did with there unreliable HE-5's that cracked like no tomorrow. Everything has an affect to each thing. You want decorative wood? The LE10's is your answer to that.
 
What I've stated is in general and is what should be done and has been done before, there is so much you can do with the design of a headphone and this applies to speakers as well, you can tune the enclosure/headphone housing/cup to suit whatever FR you're targetting for what the transducer's are most capable of in that design, there is so little you can do with tuning transducers especially dynamics, yes planars and ESL size of driver matters but at the end of the day you're not strapping bare drivers to your ears and calling it a final product, so using the right material, shape, distance of drivers, angled or flat, open, semi open and especially earpads these all affect the final sound and FR. Not all wooden cup headphones don't have dampening, I know for a fact that the Denon D2/5/7k range didn't which is why Mark made the mods posted here half a decade ago to dampen the drivers and wooden cups to get better sound using dynamat and dynaxorb, the FA-002/03 and Ti cups have something called steps which is milled out grove steps around the curvature of the inner cups, I've spoken to Dimitri before who works for FA and his sent me a diagram (subjective) one of differences in sound every cup they have offer's, this includes the 5 and 8 stepped cups, this is a form of dampening to elevate or attenuate the FR for a specific target or purpose, it's a common misconception to think dampening as adding wool to a surface. 
 
Also comparing closed design to open design is apples and bananas comparison and I don't know why you brought that into the argument which the original statement you made was "wood resonate like crazy". As with the last point that you've said "almost nobody uses damping in headphones anymore, they just slap drivers into the cups and call it good" yeah this is true and that's why so many of those headphones are absolute crap when it comes to objective scale measurement. But you should know this by now.

My mistake on the R10, looking up a few pictures proved that you were right on that. However, I stand firm on the LCDs. "If Audeze wanted to do that they could've just made a wooden O-ring to sleeve around an inner metal ring or driver support"... that is EXACTLY what they did. They explicitly state so on the LCD-X information page, though the rings in question are anodized aluminum instead of wood.
 
I understand the concept of the enclosure mattering more than the transducer, and yes a properly dampened enclosure can eliminate CSD problems, but I was talking about straight undampened wooden cups, which is what the FA-003Ti would have after swapping.
 
Okay, fine, you want CSDs, you get CSDs. All three of these headphones use the exact same driver. The only difference is the enclosure.
 
Grado RS-1: wood cups, horrific 2k and 5k ringing, some bass nonsense:

 
Alessandro MS-1: plastic cups, worse on the 2k but better on the 5, a bit slopper, better bass:

 
Grado HF-2: metal cups, much lower level ringing throughout the entire graph, particularly in the areas the others were problematic in:

 
Wood reflects like crazy, I rest my case. Plastic isn't so much better, as it is a compromise, but metal is clearly superior to either. And these are open headphones. I'm almost scared to think of what a fully closed undampened wooden headphone would look like.
 
And, don't pull that whole "you can't compare closed to open" nonsense, I've had enough of that. They're all headphones, they can all be compared. 

 

[DefQon]

  My mistake on the R10, looking up a few pictures proved that you were right on that. However, I stand firm on the LCDs. "If Audeze wanted to do that they could've just made a wooden O-ring to sleeve around an inner metal ring or driver support"... that is EXACTLY what they did. They explicitly state so on the LCD-X information page, though the rings in question are anodized aluminum instead of wood.
 
I understand the concept of the enclosure mattering more than the transducer, and yes a properly dampened enclosure can eliminate CSD problems, but I was talking about straight undampened wooden cups, which is what the FA-003Ti would have after swapping.
 
Okay, fine, you want CSDs, you get CSDs. All three of these headphones use the exact same driver. The only difference is the enclosure.
 
Grado RS-1: wood cups, horrific 2k and 5k ringing, some bass nonsense:

 
Alessandro MS-1: plastic cups, worse on the 2k but better on the 5, a bit slopper, better bass:

 
Grado HF-2: metal cups, much lower level ringing throughout the entire graph, particularly in the areas the others were problematic in:

 
Wood reflects like crazy, I rest my case. Plastic isn't so much better, as it is a compromise, but metal is clearly superior to either. And these are open headphones. I'm almost scared to think of what a fully closed undampened wooden headphone would look like.
 
And, don't pull that whole "you can't compare closed to open" nonsense, I've had enough of that. They're all headphones, they can all be compared. 

 
I haven't heard or opened up the new LCD XC and X so I don't know about what shenanigans Audeze is pulling off, I've been working my ass off to getting my rev.1's finished with the new mods which I've gotten a local recorder to measure and it shows improvements and better linearity than what it was stock and this is by 3 things I've done modifications to the wooden ring, the back grill and dampening (very similar methods to the new fazer execution Audeze uses for the new LCD's) to the driver. 
 
I'm not sure if the MS-1's, RS-1 and HF-2 use the same drivers I've read reports stating they are quite different to each other even with custom wooden cups on, there was a massive Grado thread dedicated to the said mods started by billavideo 5 or so years ago but that thread is locked now.
 
At the end of the day it's not just wood that causes irregularities to measurements, any poorly executed design and undampened even dampened housing can have resonance, every headphone has it be it alu, plastic or wood it's something you can't eliminate but greatly reduce if done right, but then people will start bitching about how crap it sounds subjectively but that's a different story. Then there's the problem of dampening on drivers, resistor mods to mimick crossover zobel networks from speakers to increase or decrease certain frequencies of sound it's a whole clusterfk of a complexity with too many variables and too little proper principal's to follow. If it sounds good to you that's all that matters.
 
True you can compare headphones be it closed and open but do take note of what it is characteristically when you discover big differences in sound, open form factor headphones are always almost going to sound better and easier to tune to a FR, closed headphones have more stuff you need to take care, is angled driver going to affect sound in this cup, is this wood going to play along with this transducer to produce said FR, is there going to be a peak or trough, is this FR this and that etc etc and add on a pile of subjective aspects people will critique that headphone on after listening with impressions etc etc.  

 

[ballard3]

Any updated impressions? 

 

[.Sup]

Very exciting. Would these do good for movies too? And what is the weight of these with wooden cups? Thanks!

 

[Makiah S]

There is really no feed back on these, I see that the guys at JDS labs are selling them. I've shot them a PM hoping to get a Demo. 
 
Here's to hoping they get back to me, as to wood yea it is reflective, and it very much colored, though each wood is a touch different some have better aucoustice properties than others, though  I own uhh all wood back headphones, though they all sound freaking glorious! My W1000X is still one of my favorite Closed Backs, an my mango Cupped HE 4 is pretty linear in terms of sound [though it had plastic cups before so] 

 

[liderbit]

Hello everybody!
 
I am interested in a comparison between FA-003 TI and Sennheiser Momentum over-ear (first version).
It will be an upgrade or downgrade?
 
Any opinions are welcomed!
 
Thanks!

 

[takato14]

  Hello everybody!
 
I am interested in a comparison between FA-003 TI and Sennheiser Momentum over-ear (first version).
It will be an upgrade or downgrade?
 
Any opinions are welcomed!
 
Thanks!

upgrade but very very different sound signatures

 

[liderbit]

Great, thanks!