I have been enjoying my KRK KNS 8400 for about a month now, and I have also enjoyed the discussions
on this nice pair of cans in this thread and several others. In this post I would like to share some of my
observations on these phones. My first observation concerns wearing glasses while listening. As a regular
switcher between wearing glasses and contact lenses, I noticed that with glasses the bass is compromised.
Somehow the legs of my spectacles break the seal of the earpads around my ears, and its seems that this
seal is important for putting the bass energy across, especially the for low bass.
(I don't know if this also holds for the 6400 earpads, but when I saw MalVeauX's review on the 6400's
(see http://www.head-fi.org/products/krk-kns6400-studio-headphones/reviews/5632 where he includes a couple of
pictures on which he wears glasses.) I could not help thinking that he would have written a slightly different
review without his glasses.)
This observation inspired me for the following simple, and easily reversible, mod for my KNS 8400's,
which is for the ones who think that the 8400's have too little bass and which warms up the sound of
the 8400's considerably and puts the bass a bit more forward in the mix:
it only takes two pieces of paper kitchen towels which you need to roll up into a two "snakes". Then tuck these "snakes"
in in between the memory foam earpad and the mesh cloth of the earpad, see below for some pictures which
I hope clarify this mod. In this way the space in the eardpad between drivers and your ears is made smaller
(perhaps this mod does not apply for big ears, mine still fit in nicely
) which might perhaps account
for the increased punch in the bass. I do not have many other phones that I can compare my modded 8400's to,
except a Grado SR60 and a Sennheiser HD485.
Without mod the bass energy of my 8400's is perhaps comparable to the bass energy of the SR60's, although the focuss
of the 8400's lies lower than that of the SR60's and it does not have the bass impact of the SR60's. With mod the bass
impact is comparable to the SR60's but with the extra energy in the low bass. (I hope that this description makes sense).
On some tracks I found the modded bass too much, on some others it was perfect. I tried to do a bit of A/B-ing
with the mod, but this proved difficult because it takes quite a while to tuck the paper towels back in (taking them
out it easy
.
Here are the promised pictures:
The 8400's with the paper towels:
Roll them up:
Tuck them in:
And here's the final result:
Well, that's it so far, I hope that this (my very first post on Headfi) was informative, and keep on
enjoying those 8400's!
