I have been having some issues with my setup for a number of months, I had been getting some hiss, extreme "S" and "T" emphasis, and weird ultrafrequency noise in one channel, which I recently managed to pin down, and it turned out to be a faulty op amp. Having had to swap for a spare pair, I've since had to re-learn what each of my headphones sounds like with the new signature. The old op amp combo was 2x burson v6 classic singles with 2 burson v6 vivid duals, and the new combo replaces the vivids with muses02.
Generally speaking I have enjoyed the tradeoff with most of my headphones, with the main exception being the HD700, which this pairing doesn't seem to compliment quite so well, which is rather interesting!
The new sound loses some soundstage width, loses both treble and bass extention, air, microdetails, and loses its more forward presentation.
What is gained is soundstage depth, different imaging (can be better or worse depending on the track) a midbass boost, more bass punch and much more hardness on the leading edge of notes.
With the vivids I found that everything was just a tad too soft, but with the extra 'edge' now, it really brings out tapping and textural sounds, which I am actually enjoying a lot, despite missing all the microdetails. But with the 700's, it is a bit of a different story.
The effect of the overall change with these seems to be, for want of a better term, exaggerated. Where once there was precise and detailed bass, now a more vague midbass presence takes over. And where there was once lots of air and separation across the width of the stage, the air gets cut off dramatically, whilst the depth of the stage pushes half of the instruments far away from me, whilst other instruments are very close to me, creating an unusual, though very interesting dual-layer presentation. Having drums in the background with a very forward bass creates an interesting presence, particularly with orchestral tracks, though for rock I find it quite hard to focus on both of them at the same time now, which is a bit fatiguing.
This is not to say that I think these headphones sound bad now, but the tradeoff in qualities is just that much greater as compared to my other headphones, that it turns them into something very different. And whilst a moderate amount of this new signature works very well for some of my headphones, I find it to be too much with the 700's: a little goes a long way.
I had read here and there about the HD700 (and HD800) being quite difficult to pair with equipment, and having only had my original setup since owning them, its something I haven't been able to relate to. Now that I've experienced it for myself, I can really appreciate that notion. It is almost as if they are so transparent to the rest of the chain, that they almost "become" what they are plugged into, and I am really quite interested to seeing what happens with them in the future when I am able to upgrade my amp and dac
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) for my HD800 to make the sound signature more tonal with a much more coherent soundstage, before making the HD700 the same and figuring out how the HD700 was supposed to fit consistently.
