@Currawong
I'm sorry, but I hadn't read about it, so I just did to see what it is about.
Resonating pads? I find this a little hard to believe, are there any measurements that confirm the resonance?
My SR60's original pads had to be replaced when I took over this headphone, so I can't say anything about how these influence the perceived sound.
In my opinion the good point about these pads
is the open structure (in combination with the particular drivers); the Grado's I have (SR60 and SR80x) interact badly with putting barriers in front (or aside for that matter) of the drivers.
As a speaker builder myself, trying to solve said problems in front of a speaker would be funny. Not that I didn't give it a try with the SR80x, but what I expected to happen proved to be correct: that what you gain (f.e. less shrillness) somewhere is what you loose elsewhere. See the beautiful thick sheepskin pads in the attachment that I added to the SR60 just to show them to you; sure they will solve some problems with the SR80x (to put them in front of an SR60 would be more rediculous btw), but you end up with a muffled sound and uncontrolled addition in some lower frequency range. This is NOT the way to solve your problems, I'm sorry.
The issue with the SR60 was more or less the opposite of the SR80x, but both anomalities were solved
behind the driver for the most part. The SR80x remained its character, I can't deny. But this is what I basically like in this headphone; the exaggeration is still there but the extremity is now gone. Then it is a matter of finding a good match with a headphone amp, be it your smartphone or some fancy class A amp.
We're not talking dsp here of course. This solves many of our problems easily; however, distortions because of resonations remain; if you don't kill these, you'll never get that 'analogue' / 'organic' (you name it) sound that you're after. And if there's an impedance mismatch or a sensitivity issue that your amp can't handle, dsp is not your friend either.