[Philimon]

Mostly posting these amateur measurements for your entertainment and for peer review. @Biodegraded

^ m3 = mod3 = mod2 + spider cage removal (including spider cage foam) plus damplifier pro applied to magnet
The results are mostly as expected. Removing the spider cage + foam would mean less driver damping, but may also mean less rear wave reflection from spider cage. Could that reflection reduction be responsible for the smoother highs? Less damping would make sense of less 1kHz in m3 vs m2. These measurements were done on mindsp EARS with sbaf compensation.

Attached is a suite of measurements done on my new flat plate coupler rig. Compared is frequency response and distortion. These are probably flawed in some way since I am new to fpc and to recording and displaying distortion. My EARS measurements on the other hand I've been practicing for awhile so those are probably reliably useable in this context for comparing mods to each other on the same rig.

My next mod will probably be applying damplifier pro to baffle and switching felt damping material to dense open foam. Needs more damping to try and improve bass distortion...

edit: distortion measurements were taken at 100db, or atleast so I tried. My technique needs work.

 

[Quadfather]

Well, I think I am going to sell my mint condition HD650 headphones with extra new ear pads, Earsonics 4.4mm balanced cable, original accessories and packaging, and a 3.5mm LQI SE cable. I don't plan on getting a desktop rig anymore.

 

[fattycheesebeef]

Well, I think I am going to sell my mint condition HD650 headphones with extra new ear pads, Earsonics 4.4mm balanced cable, original accessories and packaging, and a 3.5mm LQI SE cable. I don't plan on getting a desktop rig anymore.

Looks good, too bad I just got mine, though wondering if 4.4mm balanced cable does considerable amount of sonic differences?

 

[Luckyleo]

Looks good, too bad I just got mine, though wondering if 4.4mm balanced cable does considerable amount of sonic differences?

No

 

[Strat1117]

If you can’t hear differences between earpads and you don’t know what sound differences are, please keep that to yourself.

Seriously? Do you think maybe that was a (pretty obvious) joke?

 

[megabigeye]

Wait. We aren’t talking about sassy migratory workers? My whole perception of Head-Fi is upside down.

 

[dakanao]

Seriously? Do you think maybe that was a (pretty obvious) joke?

I mean the ASR mentality of “only transducers sound different and everything else sounds the same” is everywhere nowadays, so it’s hard to know if he was joking, or mocking me for hearing a difference between different earpads.

 

[castleofargh]

Wait. We aren’t talking about sassy migratory workers? My whole perception of Head-Fi is upside down.

OMG, transient! I first saw your post and couldn't understand how to link it with pads...
I was going to say that it's not @dakanao's week(misinterpreting FR change for transient stuff, turning on you for no apparent reason, and then digging a deeper hole by making some strawman about ASR, also for very unclear reason), but now IDK if I'm in any position to judge.

Oh man, I swear I was like "pads, hobos, I don't get it!!!!!! Maybe because I'm French I don't know about some slang?" So I go look up urban dictionary(the most unreliable thing on the web after a review that discusses PRaT), and of course there's like 80 weird interpretations of "pad" with probably 3 that actually make sense. So now I'm in an alternate reality, trying to come up with jokes based on the strangest definitions of "pad"... A stable genius is what I am.

 

[ColdsnapBry]

One annoying thing is my 6XX scales up as I keep buying better DACs and Amps, so it stays in my collectoin. It even can hang with my Verite Open and Aeolus, even does some things better than those two headphones.

 

[Strat1117]

I mean the ASR mentality of “only transducers sound different and everything else sounds the same” is everywhere nowadays, so it’s hard to know if he was joking, or mocking me for hearing a difference between different earpads.

I agree with you there, but the response you reacted to was a pretty obvious pun on the term ‘snappy transients’ in the previous post. The guy who questioned what you mean by snappy transients is the one who deserved your wrath, not him.

Dead horse. .’nuff said.

 

[dakanao]

I agree with you there, but the response you reacted to was a pretty obvious pun on the term ‘snappy transients’ in the previous post. The guy who questioned what you mean by snappy transients is the one who deserved your wrath, not him.

Dead horse. .’nuff said.

My native language isn’t English, so I didn’t really understand the humor side of it

 

[dakanao]

OMG, transient! I first saw your post and couldn't understand how to link it with pads...
I was going to say that it's not @dakanao's week(misinterpreting FR change for transient stuff, turning on you for no apparent reason, and then digging a deeper hole by making some strawman about ASR, also for very unclear reason), but now IDK if I'm in any position to judge.

Oh man, I swear I was like "pads, hobos, I don't get it!!!!!! Maybe because I'm French I don't know about some slang?" So I go look up urban dictionary(the most unreliable thing on the web after a review that discusses PRaT), and of course there's like 80 weird interpretations of "pad" with probably 3 that actually make sense. So now I'm in an alternate reality, trying to come up with jokes based on the strangest definitions of "pad"... A stable genius is what I am.

I was not upset, I just didn’t understand the joke.

So you’re saying that thinner earpads have the exact same transient attack and decay speed as thicker pads?

 

[Quadfather]

I was not upset, I just didn’t understand the joke.

So you’re saying that thinner earpads have the exact same transient attack and decay speed as thicker pads?

Jokes and tonal queues are nonexistent with printed or typed responses.

 

[castleofargh]

I was not upset, I just didn’t understand the joke.

So you’re saying that thinner earpads have the exact same transient attack and decay speed as thicker pads?

I'm not. if only because there's a tight relation between FR and an impulse response(or any transient event). So even if the only relevant change(anything audible) was the FR change, I couldn't claim that the transient stuff are the exact same. And at least objectively(audibility is another story), FR change isn't the only thing going on when you change the volume of the internal cavity and very likely a good deal of acoustic damping with a different amount of seal.
But how do you measure that? How do you confirm that it's audible and feels like what you're feeling? This seems like an even more complicated issue given how the FR will also change significantly, so we'll never be completely sure that change is really how freely the driver moves and how "fast".

On the other hand, there is ample evidence that different pads can have very audible FR impacts. It's relatively easy to measure and I do it(badly and for the lolz) every time I get new pads. There is also ample evidence that you can change various impressions of various instruments with an EQ(there's even a job about that). The settings used in a mix for snares may be more aggressive than what 2 different pads would do(luckily because we wouldn't want that kind of EQ on the all song), but audibility and subjective impact are hard to reject. At best we might argue that there can be other variables involved, but not that FR change has nothing to so with our subjective impression of ... almost everything.


I understand how intuitively we feel "speed" so we think it's time domain stuff, but I do not know for a fact that it is in this case. Doesn't it just make more sense to treat this as a FR change when all the evidence of FR change and its audibility is in our face?
I'm perfectly fine considering various causes changing the airflow and how freely the driver can move, but without supporting evidence of significant(audible!) impact in that area from swapping 2 pads, I would leave it as an open hypothesis, and stick with the evil I know: FR.

 

[equalspeace]

The 84 strand Litz cable from Custom Cans is King with the the 650. I'm honestly shocked at how good it is with this headphone