[hwc]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mrvile /img/forum/go_quote.gif Spray adhesive might be some of the worst stuff to ever be invented by man. I can't even think of a legitimate use for that crap.

It's good for mounting posters on poster board. It's also perfect for putting that gray industrial carpet stuff on subwoofer boxes in car stereo systems.

But, when you use it, you want to be in a well-ventilated place and just resign yourself to a sticky mess on your hands for a couple of days.

Agree. I wouldn't want it in the same room with my headphones. It'll get all over everything and never come off.

 

[Autochthon]

I'd assume you'd need to mask everything but I'll take your word for it not being worth the risk.
edit: I'd never actually tried it on anything but I can imagine if the spray pattern is anything like aerosol paint then it spreads itself wide.

 

[hwc]

It does go everywhere. And it has a half-life similar to plutonium. You could come back ten years later and everything would still be a sticky mess.

 

[sgrossklass]

Quote:

Originally Posted by hwc /img/forum/go_quote.gif So, why use an open baffle at all? Because if you use a solid baffle, you are forming a very small, undersized sealed box speaker enclosure around your ear -- an enclosure that is going to have very funky effects on the bass response. My guess is that an HD580 with a solid baffle would have big obnoxious mid bass peaks. The open baffle is important for tuning the bass, but you really dont want midrange/high frequencies coming through the openings in the baffle.

I'm not sure whether it's only or primarily that. The Philips consumer cans, e.g. SHP805 or SHP895, are examples of semi-open cans with closed baffles. After damping the inside of the SHP805's earcups, which did remove some high frequency nastiness (the biggest improvement came from covering the bare plastic holding the earpads though), soundstage got fairly small - so I'd say the backwave leakage is used to improve soundstaging. The increased bass punch in these cans appears to be mostly the result of the high-density foam earpads. (Someone once described a pretty radical SHP895 mod here which included replacing the earpads with some having lambswool(?) filling.)

Quote:

Originally Posted by hwc /img/forum/go_quote.gif The improvement on the HD-595s is stunning. They have some advantages over the 580 in driver placement, a more transparent cover in front of the driver, and dead-flat bass response, but are worse from an internal reflection standpoint. Damping the internal reflections makes a huge difference, but preserves the liveliness of the headphones. I'm noticing stuff I've never heard on any audio system. Things like the sound of a thin-guage pick striking the strings of strummed acoustic guitar. It's a really familar sound to anyone who plays acoustic guitar, but I've never noticed it so prominently in recorded music -- it's the kind of instantaneous attack that would be masked in a living room or by those internal reflections in a headphone. The soundstage gets huge with the damping.

Which again shows that the enclosure frequently is the largest bottleneck in mass-produced cans. If one can improve that with a little DIY effort, all the better.

 

[lipidicman]

Interesting ideas. Has anyone tried this and ABX'ed a modded and stock version? We have two at home but I am not taking glue to my babies.

 

[hwc]

Quote:

Originally Posted by sgrossklass /img/forum/go_quote.gif I'm not sure whether it's only or primarily that. The Philips consumer cans, e.g. SHP805 or SHP895, are examples of semi-open cans with closed baffles. After damping the inside of the SHP805's earcups, which did remove some high frequency nastiness (the biggest improvement came from covering the bare plastic holding the earpads though), soundstage got fairly small - so I'd say the backwave leakage is used to improve soundstaging.

I think soundstage and imaging is related to frequency response. For example, take a 400 hz "note" -- a drum beat, a plucked guitar string, whatever. The ear interprets the location of that sound from its harmonic signature, the combination of the fundamental tone plus the harmonics at 800hz, 1600 Hz, 3200 Hz, etc. If you do something to mask the harmonic structure, imaging and soundstage falls apart. One of the biggest culprits is any kind of midbass muddiness or boominess. If you increase the level of the 400 Hz note, especially if you are adding ringing or resonance that persists over time (microseconds), you just obliterate the original harmonic structure.

With a sealed driver baffle and an around-the-ear design, that little tiny enclosure formed in front of the driver is going to make it very difficult to get smooth, flat frequency response in the midbass region. A ideally flat sealed box woofer in a perfectly sealed, perfectly rigid room increases in frequency response at 12 db per octave below the lowest fundamental resonance of the room (determined by wavelength of the room dimensions.). In the case of a headphone, the "room" is so small that the lowest fundamental resonance might be at 3000 Hz. Using a dipole-woofer (which is what an open baffle design is), eliminates (or at least reduces) this rising bass problem.