(actual post -- after submitting accidentally earlier)
Spent the morning casually pad rolling my HE6se's. I think I've made a few discoveries worth sharing. My previous favorite pad for these was the Dekoni Fenestrated, but after some more experimentation I've concluded that those Dekonis actually make my STAX 007 sound better than the stock pads, and since she's my holy grail headphone for now, she just gets whatever she wants without consideration for any other can in the rotation. She's my BAE, if you will.
So, I tried the following on the HE6se:
Dekoni Fenestrated
Dekoni Velour (for AKG, taped on)
Kennerton Lambskin (some internal perforations)
STAX 007 Leather (newly liberated)
And I also messed around with some tuning foam from my DCA Aeon 2's (all three versions from the tuning kit that comes with the cans), the tuning foam from the inside of my AKG Q701 and some other bits of foam I had lying around.
My objective was to make the upper-mids and lower-treble a little more palatable, and less aggressive. I really love these headphones for the great punch and the tactility/texture, as well as the imaging capabilities, but man does the top-end of these cans get fatiguing (quickly) with certain types of music and particularly with complex, dense tracks that have been heavily compressed. I think resonances in these frequencies are a major issue for me. The attack of some percussive sounds (like the initial crack of a snare for example) gets to be too much for me after a bit. I was hoping I could come up with a combination of materials that would tame this region while retaining all of the best qualities of the HE6se and not neuter them completely.
I always find the HE6se to be a bit too lean for my tastes, and always use EQ (Lokius) with these, giving them a downward-sloping treatment. Perhaps I'll follow up with a picture of what a typical EQ setting on the Lokius looks like for me.
So what I thought would work well, and what
actually wound up being a good solution were 2 totally different things, surprisingly. I thought softer materials like velour would absorb higher frequencies nicely and give the desired attenuation, while less-absorbent and more-reflective materials (smooth leather for example) would make the issues worse. So I tried the Dekoni velours with and without damping materials on the inside, and found that they were a terrible combination. It was considerably worse than stock. Extremely harsh, actually. The Kennerton pads with white DCA tuning felt were much better, but I found that the tuning felts were stealing a bit of resolution and imaging from the sonic presentation, and this wasn't acceptable. This was basically true with anything I stuffed in between my ear and the driver. Nearly all tuning materials made the highs less harsh and improved tonality, but at too costly an expense to the resolution. Some combinations reduced instrument separation, staging and layering so much that the HE6se's character was almost completely lost, making them smeared and narrow.
Stock pads are actually quite good, as many of you know. My issue with them is more about the lack of "premiumness" they lend to the headphone. I want these things to look and feel like the MSRP of 1800, and not the paltry 500 bucks they actually sell for
But the sound of stock pads is really quite good, despite the cheapo feel. Still I thought there might be a better option.
In the end I somewhat flippantly decided to try the STAX pads. My notions about the velour had been completely off-base, so perhaps I'd be wowed by the all-leather pads? Well much to my surprise this turned out to be the best of all by a very large margin. And I think I know why. I had only been considering the materials of the pads, and not the interior volume that the pad creates. I think this is the key to the benefits of the 007 pads. They're "D" shaped and also pretty soft and compressible, creating a fantastic seal for me, and allowing the drivers to sit closer to my ears than any of the other options I tried. I assume this is kind of like the 2021 revision improvements to the LCD pads with Audeze when they switched from thicker memory foam pads to the much softer open-cell foam they now use. I think a more compressible material that reduces volume around the ear can, in some instances, make for a much more agreeable tuning with less of a chamber in which sound waves can reflect. This is 100% the case for me with the HE6se and these 007 pads. I'm not sure which other brands are making this style of pad (well Audeze does, but the attachment "system" with them is just double-sided tape and I believe they are larger in diameter too) but I'm curious to find some other options. I haven't even tried any damping materials inside of the cavity, but might give some of them a try. I also find the quantity of bass to be a bit more, and I don't think I'll need quite so much EQ going forward. This combo is a clear winner to my ears.
You might give this a try yourselves. I'd be very curious to hear others' experiences with shallower "D" shaped pads...
