[leeperry]

 

Originally Posted by rhythmdevils /img/forum/go_quote.gif
Also, is the difference between a "dry" and "liquid" sound the result of different decay rates?  Someone said this in the LCD-2 thread, and it seemed to make a lot of sense.  And if that is true, does dampening change the decay rate?  I'm also not sure I understand the difference between decay and transients I'll have to look into that.

 Yeah, good questions....anyone's up for an answer by any chance?

 

[gurubhai]

Not sure how different decay rates affect perception of audio but IME different damping does lead to sounds which you can call "dry" or "organic".I always imagined it as loss of bass harmonics due to overdamping leading to a drier sound.
I usually take it is a sign of overdamping if the midrange sounds dry.Getting the balance right between them is rather tricky since if you go towards less damping then the imaging becomes less precise,less detail retrieval & the sound would remind me of a dynamic can(my ol' HD580). OTOH, overdamping sucks the mid dry & kills the enjoyment.
The LCD-2 is one of the rare orthos which have a very balanced damping applied at stock, I do find them a slightly (very) overdamped though.

 

[wualta]

Quote:

Someone did this a while back with the T20v2 and reported good things - I have never tried and have no experience here. Essentially a ribbon concept but tightly stretched and fixed. Waulta? ..dB

More of a mini-Magneplanar than a true ribbon. Maggies have always been single-ended. If you keep the flux uniform over the diaphragm's excursion limits and/or you have a big driver with lots of square inches so you don't need big excursions in the first place, it's not a huge problem. To say it another way, push-pull is popular because it gives better linearity over a larger excursion, but if you can keep the excursion down, you'll be all right going single-ended. For critical listeners who listen to "liquid" (dampened? moistened?) bass, which to me means "lively" or "unfettered" which then translates to "slightly underdamped" bass, push-pull is the way to go. Making a single layer of magnets throw a nice, even, and thick layer of flux down so the diaphragm's in the middle of it-- that's tough. If you tension the diaphragm high so deep bass and wide excursions aren't a possibility, you'll never hear the distortion that comes from a diaphragm moving out of its magnetic field.
 
To me, an overdamped diaphragm sounds "dry" because the damping isn't just preventing excessive, unwanted diaphragm motion-- it's starting to cut into wanted motion, like a peak limiter.
 
I myself have been called "tightly stretched and fixed" but that's another discussion entirely and beyond the scope of this paper. Thank you.

 

[leeperry]

Yeah, OK...overdamping is subjective, and more than anything else an acquired taste IMO.
 
Using DIY stuff such as felt, blutack and so can be a hit or miss as they might very well end up not filtering the right frequencies...but once you try acoustic damping foam and sound deadening clay, it seems that you can turn an ortho(T50RP in my case) into an anechoic room. And I would guess that it'd take some time to get used to loudspeakers in such a resonances-free room.
 
The nasty back-effect is that after a while, you will get used to hearing a clear low distortion sound...not polluted by the drivers back-wave distortion anymore

 
The T50RP drivers are big boys, they don't need resonances to project a deep and wide SS IME...unlike most dynamics, hence the need for Beyer to use stronger magnets in their new Premium models?
 
Beyer boasts about Tesla's figures, but the Fostex seem to use very strong magnets as well....how could you get such thick low end bass otherwise? When I compared the MDR-CD900ST(40mm) to the MDR-CD3000(50mm), it seemed dead obvious that the 40mm couldn't keep up in the low end bass department...bloat bloat bloat, and a major lack of resolution.
 
How's the LCD-2 damping then? I haven't seen any cups inside shots

 

[JadeEast]

Quote:

 
How's the LCD-2 damping then? I haven't seen any cups inside shots

We seem to have 2 definitions of dampening going. One an Ortho-centric acoustic dampening of driver motion and the other a mechanical dampening of the cups and non driver resonance.

 

[leeperry]

Well, I believe one is called "damping"(absorbing the back-waves and "delaying the reverberation times", as they say in acoustic foam datasheets) and the other "dampening"(dynamat-like, not allowing something to physically vibrate). But english isn't my native tongue, that's mostly what I understood after reading a whole bunch of web pages on both subjects.
 
Would anyone have a link to the LCD-2 inside shots? I know it's a "taboo" subject but I saw what's inside a deep cups darth...humm well, not exactly rocket science to put it nicely.

 

[ericj]

Quote:

Well, I believe one is called "damping"(absorbing the back-waves and "delaying the reverberation times", as they say in acoustic foam datasheets) and the other "dampening"(dynamat-like, not allowing something to physically vibrate). But english isn't my native tongue, that's mostly what I understood after reading a whole bunch of web pages on both subjects.
 
Would anyone have a link to the LCD-2 inside shots? I know it's a "taboo" subject but I saw what's inside a deep cups darth...humm well, not exactly rocket science to put it nicely.

Posting photographs of physical objects that have been sold to private parties should never be considered "taboo", and anyone who thinks it should be is full of crap. If Larry couldn't compete on the strength of his quality and customer service that's his problem.
 
We have whole books of laws for how to protect intellectual property, and going around telling people it's wrong to take pictures of an object they own outright is asinine.

 

[BoilermakerFan]

WRT to the LCD-2s, opening them up voids the warranty.  That's why peeps haven't cracked them open to take pics. 

 

[ericj]

Quote:

WRT to the LCD-2s, opening them up voids the warranty.  That's why peeps haven't cracked them open to take pics. 

Are there vents big enough for a very small borescope?

 

[wualta]

Damping: controlling the twitchy oscillatory motion of something
Dampening: Making something wet by throwing water on it
 
That's what I think of when I hear those terms, yet there's a whole potful of instances where the terms are used interchangeably, and on the Intarnette at least, dampening appears to be winning. Regardless, here on Head-Fi, the terms mean the same thing. We're controlling unwanted vibration, whether it's a diaphragm that's become overly eager at resonance, or a headphone enclosure that "sings" along with the music produced by said diaphragm.

 

[Armaegis]

So would dampening the damping material make it more effective?

 

[leeperry]

 

So would dampening the damping material make it more effective?

cryo would

 

[Armaegis]

So dampening the damping material will aid to dampen it further, but I suspect that a cryo treatment would increase unwanted reflections, as well as result in potential dissolution of the dampened damping material.

 

[GeorgeGoodman]

Quote:

So dampening the damping material will aid to dampen it further, but I suspect that a cryo treatment would increase unwanted reflections, as well as result in potential dissolution of the dampened damping material.

Do another cryo treatment on that whole thing and leave it out in a tree under a full moon while burning it in and you have quite possibly the "Finest nuances and dynamic range I have ever heard in a headphone," says Stereophile reviewer George Goodman in the December 2010 issue. "When you hear this headphone, you will never want to go back to any other. I am literally hearing things I have never heard before."
 
Sorry. I couldn't resist. 

 

[Rick]

No no no, didn't you read the fine print?  he wasn't lying, he did infact hear things he'd never heard before, just, this was the first time he remembered to wear his hearing aids while listening....