Just received my HE1000SE. Was not expecting a planar to have such crazy driver speed, but wow. Such crisp. Almost like an old Stax. FLAC/WAV Roon —> Chord Qutest —>Schiit Asgard 2 in low gain.
But the treble…oof. It is intolerably bright to the point where I just stop listening because it becomes painful. Tool’s Lateralus, for example, was near ear-piercing. Not exaggerating. Whereas the Meze Elite I’m auditioning sounds sublime with respect to treble. But the bass tends to be uncontrolled and sloppy and there seems to be a veil over the entire frequency response. Not impressed, especially at the $4k price point.
I feel like the Asgard 2 might be holding back both these headphones. Do I need to go the tube route (Cayin HA-300MK2, for example) to smooth out the highs? Or do I need 100 hours of burn-in? Or does quality control suck that bad?
HiFiMan planars have indeed presented some of the most incisive transients I have heard.
Now, I would contribute the view that "driver burn-in" is more likely "mental burn-in" in the sense of acclimatization to tonality or treble levels one is not used to, whereby I have personally experienced "mental burn-in" with the mere act of getting used to a new EQ profile. It would help to clarify whether it is the treble (3 kHz to 9 kHz) or the top octave (10 kHz to 20 kHz) that is bothering. Either way, I found that certainly even after 180 hours of playback, those frequencies produced by the driver will not physically change, or the best you would get are less than a dB of change due to differences in pad compression and position relative to your ears (see Figures 1 and 2 below). As for "putting up with brightness", I suppose acclimatization may allow one to appreciate greater vividness and clarity in music, or be able to better bear brightness levels consistent with "true neutrality" as you would measure from neutral speakers with in-ear mics.
Neutral studio monitors can impart more than 5 dB more 2 kHz to 5 kHz "ear gain", making neutral headphones regarded as "resolving" sound relaxed. (2024-03-19: See "Calibration using threshold of hearing curves" in
https://www.head-fi.org/threads/rec...-virtualization.890719/page-121#post-18027627 (post #1,812). Everything I have said about neutral speakers actually having a lot more ear gain than neutral headphones was wrong.)
Regarding HiFiMan QC,
https://www.head-fi.org/threads/totl-disappointments.925164/page-63#post-17949397 (post #936) covered my findings with three different HE1000se units, and Pelilin back in
https://www.head-fi.org/threads/hifiman-he1000-se.886228/page-333 discussed their own detection of audible driver matching and distortion issues with a unit also dated to November production like the two "bad" units I encountered, but I personally found the distortion barely audible and certainly not a situation like treble accentuated beyond QC control of driver tonality.
Figure 2: Third HE1000se unit right driver distortion measurement, the very first signal I had played through this unit. The distortion between 1.5 kHz and 5 kHz is accentuated compared to the past good unit I received, and there are likewise more audible higher-order distortion harmonics. These measurements are taken with in-ear microphones in a setup described in
https://www.head-fi.org/threads/con...-series-on-cables-mattering-for-audio.970430/ (post #8).
Figure 2: Third HE1000se unit right driver distortion measurement after around 180 hours of playback. Playback was probably a bit louder than in that very first measurement for which the level calibration was only approximate to avoid playing any test signal through the driver prior to taking the first measurement. At best,
maybe some "driver exercising" helped abate the QC-related 2 kHz distortion, though the higher than ideal 4 kHz distortion was still present if not accentuated. Otherwise, it should be clear from the upper brown trace that barely anything in the frequency response changed that couldn't be explained by the positioning of the headphones or my in-ear microphones having changed a bit between the two measurement sessions.
Figure 3: First HE1000se unit left driver distortion measurement within a day of receipt. As can be seen, the distortion levels between 2 kHz and 5 kHz are in much better control with primarily less audible second-order distortion (the red trace), 4 kHz being what I consider to be a "known resonance" that I suppose HiFiMan engineering has yet to resolve for such a large driver. This distortion performance was already a relative excellence that no amount of "physical burn-in" would have improved. You can also see that unit variation for frequency response isn't bad.
Regarding the Meze Elite, I would argue that though the bass and lower midrange is accentuated in the stock hybrid pad tonality, when EQed to neutral, the Meze Elite exhibits the lowest distortion bass I know of and exceptional multi-tone distortion as shown in
https://www.head-fi.org/threads/hifiman-he1000-se.886228/post-17865104 (post #4,789) and
https://www.head-fi.org/threads/rec...r-speaker-virtualization.890719/post-17955514 (post #1,801).