Side grade or up grade is all a matter of opinion. The HE-6 is a steal at it's current price no doubt. Just like the HE-6 is just as good or better in the mids compared to the LCD. If I had to pick one it would be the LCD "midrange only"
Also If I put down a list of boxes to check and total them up as an overall grade. Which I've done. On my list the Abyss wins. Comparing planars to planars.
Since there are always trade offs, at the end of the day it depends on which boxes ticked are more important to you. That's why I like the HD800 more than most others do, etc.
Don't be so certain that the HE-6 isn't able to do some things you thought it couldn't , if you can get the voicing
just right it is shockingly good. I recently did a "rethink" on some of the things I'd done to it & was planning to in
the near future . A few days I thought about what it was that l like about how my Magneplanar speakers sound
& how some of the basic "fittings" of the HE-6 differed . So I decided to see if making a more "Maggie" like version of the 6. I'm calling it my "Maggified" HE-6".
The first thing that came to mind was that while I preferred the sound of outside of the phones with no damping material or grille , the sound while open is a bit to raw. I decided to not Regrille the opening with some woven material I decided to cut from a partition of an office divider panel (it's pretty close in form to the Maggie grille material). It works exceptionally well. It seems to have retained that nice open volume of sound while slowing down the air movement enough to avoid that slight metallic tinge to it.
I'm pretty happy using the velour AKG Earpads (they are slightly oversized,but I like the sonic neutrality they lend). For what I listen to I really haven't had any real need to damp the ear side driver panel due to any lack
of clarity due to mechanically induced frequency confusion. I did find that the musical detail has a slight edge
that the thin material attached to the bottom of the Earpads, along with pieces of the smallest sized shelf liner
sitting on top of the material cleans up the edge to the sound with no effect to clarity. (I know exactly why I'm not
finding adding a "Fuzzor" type addition to be necessary, but it involves doing somethings to your playback chain
at the beginning of it ; I only needed some finishing nails that were needed as opposed to a Railroad spike solution that the Fuzzor would be)
I can't compare these cans to my modded HD800 as its really a PITA to match amplifier levels (the Senns are way to sensitive). In my system , the comparison is going to be way closer than most would think. Off the top of my head I'm going to say the HE-6 are more detailed at both ends of the Frequency spectrum
(Please excuse my not editing the sentence form , as I type these postings on a IPad Mini & my eyes are screaming at me at the moment)
