[audiojun]

The 650 cable is thicker but I never swapped cables. Funny thing about cables was I went to the Cardas booth at canjam and sat down and had a nice chat with a guy there. He had the 650 already connected in balanced configuration, so I try his 650 and then I try my modded 650 connected non-balanced. His stock balanced 650 vs my modded 650 non-balanced, I preferred my modded 650. So then I was thinking I want to try balanced Cardas cables on my modded 650 so I connected the balanced cables onto my 650 and loaded up the same Hans Zimmer Inception sound track premixed with Dolbe Headphone that I was using to test all the gear at canjam. I didn't hear a big difference between balanced Cardas cables vs stock HD650 cables. So I asked the guy how much they cost and he said its $50 off and normally retails for over $200. After hearing that I nopped out of there. What's good is I got a free cardas hat from the booth.
 
I no longer have the HD600 just shipped it out today. I am trying to resist the urge to buy the Purpleheart TH-X00.

 

[Kodachrome2000]

i was trying to resist the urge to buy the purpleheart as well - that's actually what made me buy the 600 bundle instead.  i wanted to start with something well-researched, inexpensive and neutral/natural so i could sink a good chunk of my money into a good all-rounder amp and then dac to provide versatility in the future as headphones come and go, with my main concern being a good soundstage.
 
*sigh*
 
so far we have like 5 different answers as to amps/dacs, lol.  now i know why you guys can spend so much; seems like there are no hard and fast rules, being that we all have different ears.
 
think i'll just buy something and call it good, haha.  i'm tired of review hunting and reading the forums; had enough for one day.  thanks for all the friendly advice, guys.  glad to have hopped back on the forums and into the headphone game for "real".  goodnight!

 

[madwolfa]

  i was trying to resist the urge to buy the purpleheart as well - that's actually what made me buy the 600 bundle instead. 

 
And I thought....
 

 

[ColtMrFire]

I went ahead and got Michael Kamen's remastered Die Hard trilogy soundtracks and HOLY GOD do they sound great.  Super clear/clean, punchy/dynamic... just the way a remastered soundtrack should sound.  
 
One thing though about my 600s now being way more transparent and resolving is bad mastering becomes painfully obvious and annoying.  Everything is still listenable (one of the hallmarks of the 600), but it becomes depressing listening to shoddy work.  
 
I'm especially disappointed in the original Star Wars trilogy, the 1993 anthology box set, which popular opinion has always said was the best masters of these scores, and I agreed with that when using crappy equipment back in the day, where everything sounded good.  But now they are a let down.  A New Hope is actually pretty good... but Empire is just okay, and Jedi is virtually un-listenable... muddy and almost muffled sounding.  There is a recent high-rez (24/192) re-release of the original LPs in digital form, so I will see what those are about...

 

[audiojun]

I went ahead and got Michael Kamen's remastered Die Hard trilogy soundtracks and HOLY GOD do they sound great.  Super clear/clean, punchy/dynamic... just the way a remastered soundtrack should sound.  

One thing though about my 600s now being way more transparent and resolving is bad mastering becomes painfully obvious and annoying.  Everything is still listenable (one of the hallmarks of the 600), but it becomes depressing listening to shoddy work.  

I'm especially disappointed in the original Star Wars trilogy, the 1993 anthology box set, which popular opinion has always said was the best masters of these scores, and I agreed with that when using crappy equipment back in the day, where everything sounded good.  But now they are a let down.  A New Hope is actually pretty good... but Empire is just okay, and Jedi is virtually un-listenable... muddy and almost muffled sounding.  There is a recent high-rez (24/192) re-release of the original LPs in digital form, so I will see what those are about...

Instead of LP in digital you can go straight to the source and get the LP on a vinyl rig. Vinyl sounds amazing when a vinyl rig is done correctly.

 

[Midgetguy]

  i was trying to resist the urge to buy the purpleheart as well - that's actually what made me buy the 600 bundle instead.  i wanted to start with something well-researched, inexpensive and neutral/natural so i could sink a good chunk of my money into a good all-rounder amp and then dac to provide versatility in the future as headphones come and go, with my main concern being a good soundstage.
 
*sigh*
 
so far we have like 5 different answers as to amps/dacs, lol.  now i know why you guys can spend so much; seems like there are no hard and fast rules, being that we all have different ears.
 
think i'll just buy something and call it good, haha.  i'm tired of review hunting and reading the forums; had enough for one day.  thanks for all the friendly advice, guys.  glad to have hopped back on the forums and into the headphone game for "real".  goodnight!

Lol, there is a single "hard and fast rule": YMMV. That is the only universally applicable piece of advice across everything available on Head-Fi and the audio world.

 

[heishiro]

   
I actually hear a noticeable difference between the stock HD600 cable and the 650 cable.  It's not dramatic or anything, but the 600 cable made the sound slightly "smaller" and less impactful.  And the 650 cable is like $20 bucks or something, so it's worth trying.
 
When I get a bit more disposable income, I'm going to investigate upgrade cables for the HD600 to see for myself if there's any merit to the fancier cables like Cardas, etc... opinion of it being a noticeable upgrade is strong, but I wanna try for myself.

unless someone can also upgrade the thin/cheap cable inside the headphone i might believe that there is a sound difference. i actually dont believe on those cable upgrade things, even if you put 100% pure copper/silver/etc cable things will still end up to the cheap cable inside the headphone.
 

 

[Midgetguy]

 
unless someone can also upgrade the thin/cheap cable inside the headphone i might believe that there is a sound difference. i actually dont believe on those cable upgrade things, even if you put 100% pure copper/silver/etc cable things will still end up to the cheap cable inside the headphone.
 

I think the idea @ColtMrFire has going on is that by having a quality cable in the chain, that is that much less that could be degrading the sound. Seems to me the logic is that eliminating as much lower quality material as one can will result in as clean of a signal as it can be. As in, while those wires in the driver may be a bottleneck, it currently deals with whatever signal degradation has already happened by the time it gets to that point.
 
But I digress. This is the HD600 thread and while this is vaguely related to the HD600, it's more suitable to being in a thread regarding cables and their effect on sound rather than here.
 
On a different note, your image has arrows pointed at the springs and if I remember correctly, you can actually change those out. I remember seeing something a long while ago about changing those springs out because sometimes they aren't coiled well and won't make contact with the 2 pins of the cable. Luckily, I don't have the problem on my set and it's still singing beautifully. I went through my gamut of headphones yesterday and my conclusion is that there's a reason my X1s are up for sale (though they are still good headphones), the TH-X00s are incredibly enjoyable pumping out EDM, and the HE560s offer spectacular clarity and resolution. But, whenever there were vocals, even in EDM tracks, the HD600 sang those sweet notes like a champ.

 

[heishiro]

 
I think the idea @ColtMrFire has going on is that by having a quality cable in the chain, that is that much less that could be degrading the sound. Seems to me the logic is that eliminating as much lower quality material as one can will result in as clean of a signal as it can be. As in, while those wires in the driver may be a bottleneck, it currently deals with whatever signal degradation has already happened by the time it gets to that point.
 
But I digress. This is the HD600 thread and while this is vaguely related to the HD600, it's more suitable to being in a thread regarding cables and their effect on sound rather than here.
 
On a different note, your image has arrows pointed at the springs and if I remember correctly, you can actually change those out. I remember seeing something a long while ago about changing those springs out because sometimes they aren't coiled well and won't make contact with the 2 pins of the cable. Luckily, I don't have the problem on my set and it's still singing beautifully. I went through my gamut of headphones yesterday and my conclusion is that there's a reason my X1s are up for sale (though they are still good headphones), the TH-X00s are incredibly enjoyable pumping out EDM, and the HE560s offer spectacular clarity and resolution. But, whenever there were vocals, even in EDM tracks, the HD600 sang those sweet notes like a champ.

sorry i just copy the pic from interweb... my point is actually the cable inside the headphone same as IEMs.
of course bad quality material is not accepted in the chain, but if you will just rely on a cable to change the sound
some one could be imagining the change. like silver wires / interconnect / plugs from our dap manufactures they use
normal gold plated 3.5 socket, then you will plug your magical silver cable and plug again to normal gold plated socket
inside your headphones or iem.. unless our dap manufacturer will make silver plated socket DAP and iem/HP manufacturer
will make the silver connectors + silver cables inside their product, then the change of sound might happen.
 
same with high quality usb/interconnect cable, from source laptop/pc they use normal/ordinary gold plated usb port.
then you will put expensive silver usb cable to go to your dac who also use normal gold plated usb port to accept the data.

 

[audiojun]

sorry i just copy the pic from interweb... my point is actually the cable inside the headphone same as IEMs.
of course bad quality material is not accepted in the chain, but if you will just rely on a cable to change the sound
some one could be imagining the change. like silver wires / interconnect / plugs from our dap manufactures they use
normal gold plated 3.5 socket, then you will plug your magical silver cable and plug again to normal gold plated socket
inside your headphones or iem.. unless our dap manufacturer will make silver plated socket DAP and iem/HP manufacturer
will make the silver connectors + silver cables inside their product, then the change of sound might happen.

same with high quality usb/interconnect cable, from source laptop/pc they use normal/ordinary gold plated usb port.
then you will put expensive silver usb cable to go to your dac who also use normal gold plated usb port to accept the data.

I agree the bottleneck is in those wires going into the drivers. This supports what I heard with cardas cables, I didn't hear a difference. I didn't even hear much of a difference going from single to balanced, just felt like a tad better channel seperation.

 

[heishiro]

I agree the bottleneck is in those wires going into the drivers. This supports what I heard with cardas cables, I didn't hear a difference. I didn't even hear much of a difference going from single to balanced, just felt like a tad better channel seperation.

 
yes even if you use diamond coated silver plated 22 awg wire at the end of the line what mater is the cable directly connect to the driver

 

[DavidA]

   
yes even if you use diamond coated silver plated 22 awg wire at the end of the line what mater is the cable directly connect to the driver

Might not want to use diamond for a coating as they are not very conductive and tend to have extremely high resistance

 (10 to the 11th power Ohms = 100,000,000,000 Ohms), I think there was mention of unicorn or fairy dust as being much more conductive, as always YMMV

 

[ColtMrFire]

it could also be your amp. try it without a dac or inputs.

Naw it wasnt the amp. I tried ERS paper in there every which way and there was never any change. The most significant change by far was putting some in the Modi 2. So there was something going on there with noise.

 

[ColtMrFire]

One thing I've noticed is the amount of sibilance present in many recordings.  I wasn't all that aware of it until recently, and now I can't un-hear it!  At first I thought it was the cans, but I know the 600 is one of the least sibilant cans out there... so it must be revealing more of it that is present in a recording, if any.  There are some tracks where there is no sibilance, and some where there is a great deal of it, so I doubt it's the cans.
 
I did a bit of reading up on it and it seems to be a sore sticking point in the music industry, with artists trying to avoid it, though I heard some pronounce it specifically to compensate for muffled AM/FM radios, which is fascinating.  There is a crap ton of sibilant recordings from the 80s.  I even went to talk to my roommate a minute ago and heard sibilance in his voice!  It's just something I didn't realize was happening until my cans got a bit better.

 

[Bob A (SD)]

  On a different note, your image has arrows pointed at the springs and if I remember correctly, you can actually change those out. I remember seeing something a long while ago about changing those springs out because sometimes they aren't coiled well and won't make contact with the 2 pins of the cable.

The spring issue was found in the HD580s.  After time and/or a lot of unplugging/plugging cables the spring's grip could loosen on the cable plug pins causing intermittancies.  If memory serves replacement springs were around $0.17 each back in the day.  This problem was rectified in the HD600/650 models.