[davidmolliere]

  Yes.  Sound really nice together. 

 
Too bad in Europe we only have PHA-3 AC (no battery) due to stupid regulations :-\

 

[qsk78]

   
Too bad in Europe we only have PHA-3 AC (no battery) due to stupid regulations :-\

Well, to me Z7 are anyway for home usage - too big for portable IMO.
So I use my pha-3 with them at home only. For portable application I have Z5.

 

[davidmolliere]

  Well, to me Z7 are anyway for home usage IMO - too big for portable.
So I use my pha-3 with them at home only. For portable application I have Z5.

 
Good point and I intend them for home use, but I think it looses a bit of flexibility even at home, it can be useful to have a battery and avoid to many wires This being said, after debating I chose to go for it, I'll need to wait a few days to get it now

 

[Bill-P]

Well, I have used my Z7 on a bus...
 
...yeah, the cable was annoying.
 
Noise isolation is actually fairly good on a bus. The relaxed treble is actually quite welcome here, as I had to turn up the volume slightly more than usual to combat bus noise (and extra vibrations), but no fatigue set in. And bus was loud enough that no one else could hear what I was listening to.
 
In a completely quiet office, though, the Z7 does leak out some very faint music. Again... not enough so that folks would hear unless I'm turning things up to dance floor level, and the next person sits pretty close to me.
 
And @purk, I won't claim my Z7 to sound like an HD800, but I think I have gotten it to a decent state as far as technicality goes. Will have to let you listen to it if we get the chance. Are you coming to CanJam, sir?

 

[ButtUglyJeff]

   
Simple...SR-009s. 

 
Classic Head-Fi....... Throw piles of money at the problem.....

 

[dweaver]

Well, to me Z7 are anyway for home usage - too big for portable IMO.
So I use my pha-3 with them at home only. For portable application I have Z5.

me too excellent combination

 

[manbear]

It's not that it's not enough. It's too much. The Asgard favors voltage over current, which is good for high impedance (250+ ohm) headphones. It's not quite so good for low impedance headphones, which will get too loud too early on the volume control, preventing you from getting as much current into the headphone as you could with a lower voltage design.

Sorry for digging up an old post, but this is simply not true. Ohm's law says that V=IR. For the same pair of headphones (e.g. same R), X amount of voltage across the drivers will always result in X/R amount of current. Same volume, too. Doesn't matter what type of amp is giving you that voltage.

Assuming you are within the operating limits of the amp (easily, in this case), listening to the same song (same frequencies, same R), yadda yadda...

 

[Mink]

I really don't find the MDR-Z7s to be dark sounding at all. Maybe relatively in direct comparison with my Denon D5000s, but overall I find them very clear and resolving. I never heard differences in recordings so obvious. 
Some CDs, Mahler 6 by Boulez (DG) for instance sound brighter with the Z7s than with my D5000s and A900Xs. ??? And curiously they can be very upfront with some recordings and with others very laid-back, and in a different way than any other headphones I heard. 
They seem more sensitive than my D5000s and A900Xs and are very dynamic.
These are some excentric headphones, I can see why someone would want to mod them, but I'm beginning to like them just as they are. 

 

[Mink]

Oh and by the way, they handle classical music very well!
When it comes to soundstage depth they beat the D5000s and A900xs easily

 

[dweaver]

I listen to a very broad section of music ranging from all forms of classical music, jazz, rock music from the 50's to the present, jazz, New Age, Heck even some country music , I have only had the odd song in any genre that has not sounded good on the Z7 or Z5 and more often than not those songs pose challenges for other headphones. I could get a different headphone that would work for those songs but then I would just have other songs that didn't work with that particular headphone.

So because the Zx's work so well with most of my music and I prefer their gentler presentation I will happily use them as I continue to shed all my other excess headphones and IEMs.

 

[cdsa35000]

A repost from CD3000 thread, might be interesting for the Z7 modders:

Don't sweat about CD3000 modding, if you're satisfied with the SQ and can't hear microphonics now, why bother?
Download the HP FR measurements from here: http://www.innerfidelity.com/headphone-data-sheet-downloads
---
That Z7 guy is using too thick and wrong heavy rubber material for dampening, actually reducing significant the "acoustic chamber (Q factor) size" affecting the calculated tonal SQ/FR as designed for.
Like the former guy was rambling about the design as intended, the Z7 was designed for without any dampening inside, the cross frame structure is the dampening.

Z7 was designed to have the "subwoofer" boomy feel, see the b4 FR of the boosted bump from 80Hz to 250Hz, after the thick dampening those are reduce too much like -6dB but the improved the lower bass-ends.

He should use thin layer dampening and littlebit light BAF wadding is way better.
---
You shouldn't remove the foam cilinder, thats designed for the standing wave dampening and virtually increase the chamber size and reduce "hollow sound", thus better bass control and wider soundstage.
Only applying thin layer tape on the "smooth" surfaced plastic walls/cup/parts is enough to reduce/absorb the reflections and resonances.
I just happened to have these "wall crack repair self-adhesive tape" from a decade ago laying around, so I can't give recent brands. And the SQ mod is "improved" to my taste only, so could differs for somebody else.
You gotta find out the "best" tape for yourself, but the tape I use was some light thin porous/abit fluffy/stretchable to stick any bumps paperfiber like fabrics.

Do your own research about acoustic resonance etc.
http://www.google.com/search?q=speaker+box+design
http://www.qtasystems.co.uk/articles/how-to-damping.htm

Actually, since you brought this up here, I guess it might be easier to discuss it here.

The Z7 has some design "problems" from my standpoint that goes beyond just "intended" engineering design philosophy. Perhaps my approach to a proper headphone design would be different from how those at Sony see it, but here are some of the pain points I saw from my perspective:

1) The structure indeed acts like a massive box of air to create the "subwoofer" boomy feel. But only if that is the case in practice. In reality, the Z7 doesn't sound anything like a subwoofer, and it's far from that.

2) The cross structure in the middle is indeed a reflecting chamber intended to boost the upper midrange and lower treble to give the Z7 a bit of "clarity", per se, but all it really accomplishes is resonance at those frequencies. Measurements (not made by me) have shown that the Z7 has resonance around 3KHz, and then extra resonance at 7-8KHz.

3) The plastic enclosure is far too light to reduce excess vibrations caused by the super strong drivers. As a result, the Z7 would have a bit of extra lower midrange or upper bass resonance that can "mask" clarity. This is not shown on a frequency response graph since these graphs are obtained using an impulse sent at a specific frequency, but play back any other frequency, and the lower midrange actually would peak up a little in an RTA analyzer, suggesting enclosure resonance.

4) Having the enclosure that way would create reflections in the inner chamber that can effectively drown out any high frequency content. This is evident in actual listening.

So instead of sounding like a high-end headphone with subwoofer bass, as intended, the Z7 actually sounds like a muddy, thick, blurry, and super indistinct mess of a headphone.

As for my choice of materials, if you'd read the links you provided, you'd know a bit more:

1) The "thick rubber material" is actually a shelf-liner with essentially the same properties as sound-absorbent foam. Here's what your link has to say about sound-absorbent foam:


This is what I did intend for the foam to be. The foam is there to reduce extra reflections caused by the aluminum surfaces of the dynamat pieces underneath. Also, they lay relatively flat against the surface, so the reduction in volume is minimal. The reduced 80-250Hz content is actually due to the effect of blocking the top port of the Z7 rather than as an effect of the foam. The foam by themselves are only there to smooth out midrange and high frequency peaks.

Here are graphs (I didn't measure these, but you can probably look up the rest on Google) of the effects of covering the top and bottom vents on the Z7:

Covering top vent:



Covering bottom vent:



2) As mentioned, using dynamat as a dampening and mass-loading material would work well for reducing excess vibrations and resonance at lower frequencies, but they would cause reflections, so proper care has to be taken while applying these things. I did intentionally use the shelf-liner to tune the upper midrange and lower treble peak of the Z7, though, as I found those peaks to be too much contrast out of the recessed feel of the frequencies around them.

3) Using acoustic fiber or some sort of wool felt in order to "effectively increase internal volume" would work well, but then that only works for sound waves. It limits air flow inside the enclosure, and again, proper care has to be taken in order to make sure pressure difference between both sides of the diaphragm is minimal. I realized later on that the Z7 already has a fairly clever way to achieve this, and so... the ports really are just there to tune frequency response. Since I enjoy a more "flat" frequency response than what the stock headphone had to offer, I nudged the frequency response in the direction that I saw fit.

4) Since that post, I did poke around a bit more and learned more about the design of the Z7 to apply a more advanced scheme of the dampening mod in order to achieve a completely different sound. But the frequency response would look almost exactly the same, because at some point, I'd bump into the stock tuning of the frequency response of the drivers. That's a hardware limitation that would require more... invasive methods to alter.

Needless to say, I didn't quite like the way the Z7 sound at stock, but I loved its technicality.

I have not heard the CD3000, so I have no idea how it would sound like... but like you said, if someone already loves the way the CD3000 sound like at stock, then I would say... don't bother messing with it.

 

[Mink]

So instead of sounding like a high-end headphone with subwoofer bass, as intended, the Z7 actually sounds like a muddy, thick, blurry, and super indistinct mess of a headphone.

???
Funny, not to justify nor to defend my purchase, but the quoted text is the exact opposite of how I perceive Z7s sound.
Coming from the D5000s, which by many are considered to be pretty bright sounding, I don't find the Z7s that much darker.

 

[cdsa35000]

...
, I won't claim my Z7 to sound like an HD800, but I think I have gotten it to a decent state as far as technicality goes. Will have to let you listen to it if we get the chance. Are you coming to CanJam, sir?

No, you haven't, if you want to hear the true Z7 potential, you'll have to get rid of the detachable connectors/plugs.
Any extra connector links and extra solder joints will degrade the SQ, they are not there to improve the SQ but improve the convenience of (balanced) cable swapping.
Connector transitions tends to muffled the SQ, by hardwiring the drivers will improve the airy, openess, body, clear, balance etc. of the SQ.

 

[Mink]

Not many will agree with me, but I find these Sony's to be highly detailed and very transparant. They beat my Denons in this regard.
Yet the details aren't thrown in your face, but are resolved in a quiet and subtle way.  
And it is remarkable how extreme these headphones are in showing you the differences in loudness between different recordings. Never did I have to adjust the volume in such a big way and as often.

 

[Bill-P]

  ???
Funny, not to justify nor to defend my purchase, but the quoted text is the exact opposite of how I perceive Z7s sound.
Coming from the D5000s, which by many are considered to be pretty bright sounding, I don't find the Z7s that much darker.

 
Bright doesn't necessarily mean it's "transparent".
 
For instance, the Audeze LCD-2 can hardly be described as bright, but yet it could be fairly transparent. On the other hand, something like the Ultrasone Edition 10 is bright... very very bright, but not transparent at all.
 
It's kind of hard to convey this, but once you go and listen more to higher-end gears, then that "transparency" will start to make some sense. It's what people meant by "speed", "transient", etc... The Stax SR-009 is one headphone that's not necessarily bright, but on first listen, people will say it's bright because they mistake its speed and transient response for brightness. Once you listen to it more and compare it side by side to the Abyss/HD800, etc... you'll find that the SR-009, in reality, is very neutral, and it's not bright at all.
 
I'm coming from a planar magnetic headphone (HE-560) in the same veins, so to me, the Z7 sounded extremely thick, muddy, and veiled.
 

No, you haven't, if you want to hear the true Z7 potential, you'll have to get rid of the detachable connectors/plugs.
Any extra connector links and extra solder joints will degrade the SQ, they are not there to improve the SQ but improve the convenience of (balanced) cable swapping.
Connector transitions tends to muffled the SQ, by hardwiring the drivers will improve the airy, openess, body, clear, balance etc. of the SQ.

 
I didn't claim to hear all of the Z7's true potential? I said I got it to a "decent state". That's still far from true potential.
 
And either way, I don't think connector transition really is as bad as you are saying. For instance, the HD800 has detachable connectors/plugs as well, and yet even with those plugs in the way, it's still a very resolving, super fast, super transparent headphone compared to many other headphones that are hard-wired.