[kman1211]

I was thinking about 58x or 660S to get to compliment my HD580 but then I thought i should look a little deeper. I didn't care much before, because well I was happy with the HD580 and didn't see HD600/650 as an upgrade. And no way a HD700. The 58x hype got to me a little, but i don't know
some strange observations please click SPOILER at bottom (I am just trying this first time)

Anyway , I'm not saying the 58x driver is from their lower series with diff coil, membrane etc. But differences are there on visual inspection. w/e or 660S is using some modified hd700 not saying that but there are some eery things about the two. But there are some very strange things. I remember Tyll almost crying, his heart was broken with 660S. And that always stuck with me. But they look so good.
And I don't get the whole 58x is at same level / surpasses 6xx.600.650, and same level as 660S . I love Sennheiser but , these mysteries ... could the 660 be hiding a circuit board , is it their dirty likkle secret? Why its so much more than 600/650?





I think I'll need to demo 660S,they all look so identical, but with a microscope there are some strange German mysteries.... ooOOOooooOoooooOooooo Wonder where Tyll is on his journey and if he saw this too.

Spoiler

The HD 700 and HD 660 S have asymmetrical venting as does the HD 58X. The HD 600/650 are more symmetrical. Though honestly I don't care as much for the HD 6XX family anymore, they never quite sounded right to me with extended ownership and I always let go of them. Except maybe the HD 600 as I remember it being the only one that grew on me, but I haven't heard one in years. The HD 800/S have the best venting design of all modern dynamic Sennheisers.

On this picture from innerfidelity, you can see the venting on the HD 600/650 are symmetrical in terms of the venting while on the HD 660 S(the HD 700 has the same venting design) there is a covered area where the cable adapter part connects. Wouldn't be surprised if say they covered the opposite vent with plastic to make it symmetrical; the HD 700 and HD 660 S may possibly sound better

 

[SHAMuuu]

Milking that brand power. How good have the consumers been to Sennheiser, for these llikle tricks. Why not detune that hd800 driver and give it to us fans. Make it $799.99. 580/600/650 is legendary design, frame etc, hd700 is not. They throwing us scraps with a little piece of bacon on it lol. On massdrop the 58x is some "homage" , bshhhplz

Now i feel what Tyll feel. Confused and sad. Maybe they reshaped the membrane , i know they must have used diff coil. But still, that is some schneaky schneaky milking.

 

[kman1211]

Milking that brand power. How good have the consumers been to Sennheiser, for these llikle tricks. Why not detune that hd800 driver and give it to us fans. Make it $799.99. 580/600/650 is legendary design, frame etc, hd700 is not. They throwing us scraps with a little piece of bacon on it lol. On massdrop the 58x is some "homage" , bshhhplz







Now i feel what Tyll feel. Confused and sad. Maybe they reshaped the membrane , i know they must have used diff coil. But still, that is some schneaky schneaky milking.

The HD 58X from what I gather sounds more like the HD 660 S than the HD 580. I honestly found the HD 660 S to have some issues in terms of imaging(weird holes as it pans left to right) and seemed to struggle with ultimate clarity. What's sad is the actual driver seems to be of higher quality than the HD 600/650 but sounded like it wasn't being utilized properly so it sounded worse than it's predecessors in many ways while showing hints of being better, one step forward but two steps backwards. Maybe I know why now. While it has more ventilation than the HD 600/650 it's not as symmetrically vented. The HD 600/650 venting design is still not as symmetrical compared to say Beyers though. Of course venting is one only part of the story, membrane design, magnet design, voice coil design, and just overall tuning have a big impact. In regards to the HD 660 S, I think people were focusing too much on the voice coil and it's lower impedance degrading the sound quality, when it's possible ventilation that was the culprit.

Would honestly like to see testing of this, comparing asymmetrical and symmetrical venting on the same drivers and see how it influences sound and measurements.

 

[SHAMuuu]

The HD 58X from what I gather sounds more like the HD 660 S than the HD 580. I honestly found the HD 660 S to have some issues in terms of imaging(weird holes as it pans left to right) and seemed to struggle with ultimate clarity. What's sad is the actual driver seems to be of higher quality than the HD 600/650 but sounded like it wasn't being utilized properly so it sounded worse than it's predecessors in many ways while showing hints of being better, one step forward but two steps backwards. Maybe I know why now. While it has more ventilation than the HD 600/650 it's not as symmetrically vented. The HD 600/650 venting design is still not as symmetrical compared to say Beyers though. Of course venting is one only part of the story, membrane design, magnet design, voice coil design, and just overall tuning have a big impact. In regards to the HD 660 S, I think people were focusing too much on the voice coil and it's lower impedance degrading the sound quality, when it's possible ventilation that was the culprit.

Would honestly like to see testing of this, comparing asymmetrical and symmetrical venting on the same drivers and see how it influences sound and measurements.

Yes, very good points. I remember all the bashing on the hd700, which is why i never bit on one. Even though prices have been slashed to 1/3 of original MSRP.

One defender of their fidelity potential was our trusted Indian reviewer buddy who did a review on it. I won't link it b/c he doesn't want his views pushed on here too much, but he said it had potential beyond the 580/6xx line and there was some minor issues which could be fixed.
Perhaps Sennheiser did this and that is why it is seen as the superior of the 6xx line.

My beef is they are the best company in the world, and maybe Beyer for making headphones, and all those waiting were not super happy.

I have 0 issues with the HD580 I have, it seems to be at peak performance from its tiny drivers.

It would be funny if they added a plastic piece on the opposite end making it some magic phone huehuheu.

And its not the only the sound per se, as its a fully open system. Have you ever blown at a menbrane, it moves! There is backpressure along with air coming in from the outside world. I don;t think symmetrical venting would make a decent sounding sound completely bad, but i am a believer of symmetrical venting providing thermal cooling advantages; that being even. At the mini transducer level is that of significant importance? Maybe not THAAAAT much, but surely
Also the air coming into the headphone from outside , if it flows into the membrane unequally, with the backpressure also escaping unequally, surely there would be some sort of turbulence; albeit not at level of more complex systems.

And yes, i remind myself these are not jet engines but still. when people are arguing over superior wires, they can't just say pish posh to magnetic venting and unequal air flow pressures both escaping, and coming in. Those membranes move with light breathing on them ! I blew on half of the creative aurvana driver, and it would move a little unevenly vs when blown in center.

I can feel the engineers laughing at us from their headquarters. But hope they appreciate the passionate nutties on here.

 

[iFi audio]

I can feel the engineers laughing at us from their headquarters. But hope they appreciate the passionate nutties on here.

Oh don't you worry, they do read what's going on in here

 

[SHAMuuu]

Oh don't you worry, they do read what's going on in here

i think the audio gods are telling me to move to stax , which is what I am contemplating.

 

[iFi audio]

i think the audio gods are telling me to move to stax , which is what I am contemplating.

Someone told us recently that: "Every audiophile into headphones will end up with a pair of Stax sooner or later and everything before this is just a road to get there".

Nuts!

 

[SHAMuuu]

Someone told us recently that: "Every audiophile into headphones will end up with a pair of Stax sooner or later and everything before this is just a road to get there".

Nuts!

I basically came in here like 5-6 years ago with V-Moda Lp2 and Sony XB1000 looking for bassier headphones since my life was car audio.

I maybe retiring with the dt48/480 and an electrostatic. Bass anemic relatively speaking.

LIFE!

 

[Katze²]

Would honestly like to see testing of this, comparing asymmetrical and symmetrical venting on the same drivers and see how it influences sound and measurements.

I was curious aswell, so I did some testing by myself.
For this I used the working driver from an otherwise broken AKG K702 that I had in my closet:

Spoiler: Pictures of driver

Back:

Front:

As mentioned previously all the AKG K500 derivatives have fully symmetrical venting.
In the case of the K702 with the two slots for the surround and the round center vent.
In stock form all of these are covered by acoustic resistors (white, woven nylon mesh).

For the test I placed some thick 90g/m^2 over the vents and taped it down with standard thin, clear duct tape.
The paper is mainly there to keep the adhesive's residue from changing the underlying mesh's properties.

I have two configurations:
First has the bottom vent completely covered while the top one is left as is.

Spoiler: Asymmetrical config.

Second one has both the top and the bottom slot blocked by half. The remaining vents are symmetrical to center.
This way the total amount of damping is comparable between the two.

Spoiler: Symmetrical config.

Both have the center vent blocked in order to shift the load further to the sides encouraging rocking even more.

Hard part was actually measuring them.
I used a setup consisting of my two only friends, one holding the driver, the other one the microphone:

Spoiler: Measurement jig

It's actually sketchier than it looks. The microphone is a 1/2€ electret capsule connected to my PC's soundcard with a poorly soldered wire.
The mic sits less than a millimeter away from the diaphragm's dome. For all measurements the felt covering the electret's bore was removed.
The felt's effect was rather minimal, dropping level above ~2 kHz by about 3 dB. Removing it allowed me to move the mic closer to the diaphragm.

For software I used REW.

Spoiler: Measurements

Frequency Response:

Below 1 kHz all drop with roughly 3-4 dB/octave.
Taping the center vent has minimal influence apart from damping the main resonance at 100 Hz.
However, taping the surround slots increases level at 2 kHz rather significantly.
This 2k resonance is definitely not due to a rocking mode because it is present in the symmetric aswell as the asymmetric config.

As you can notice, symmetric has 3 dB less SPL at 20 Hz compared to the others.
This is likely because I couldn't manage to move the microphone close enough to the driver.
This type of near-field measurement is very sensitive to placement.
The small dips at 60 Hz and its multiples are likely due to my two friends.

Distortion:

It says 90 dB but whether this is actual SPL I cannont guarantee. For the sake of a relative comparison it should be close enough.
Both graphs look virtually identical except for the bass distortion which is clearly lower in the symmetric config.

To take a closer and less noise influenced look at the bass distortion I performed a Stepped Sine Measurement from 20 to 1000 Hz.
Settings:
1/12 octave steps, 4 averages, FFT length=131072
0 ms silence
69 measurement points
This is 10 dB higher level than the previous measurement:

Symmetric drops THD by about 5%

Conclusion:
I'd take this with a nice grain of salt because the setup is clearly not ideal.
Symmetric does appear to have less distortion, however this could very well be because of the level difference.
I say this because the stock, untouched, symmetric AKG driver performs very similarly compared to what I would call the worst case scenario for rocking:

Spoiler: stock measurements

Still wanted to share because REW in the background makes for some interesting bokeh and this is the driver pics thread after all.

 

[SHAMuuu]

I was curious aswell, so I did some testing by myself.
For this I used the working driver from an otherwise broken AKG K702 that I had in my closet:

Spoiler: Pictures of driver

Back:

Front:

As mentioned previously all the AKG K500 derivatives have fully symmetrical venting.
In the case of the K702 with the two slots for the surround and the round center vent.
In stock form all of these are covered by acoustic resistors (white, woven nylon mesh).

For the test I placed some thick 90g/m^2 over the vents and taped it down with standard thin, clear duct tape.
The paper is mainly there to keep the adhesive's residue from changing the underlying mesh's properties.

I have two configurations:
First has the bottom vent completely covered while the top one is left as is.

Spoiler: Asymmetrical config.

Second one has both the top and the bottom slot blocked by half. The remaining vents are symmetrical to center.
This way the total amount of damping is comparable between the two.

Spoiler: Symmetrical config.

Both have the center vent blocked in order to shift the load further to the sides encouraging rocking even more.

Hard part was actually measuring them.
I used a setup consisting of my two only friends, one holding the driver, the other one the microphone:

Spoiler: Measurement jig

It's actually sketchier than it looks. The microphone is a 1/2€ electret capsule connected to my PC's soundcard with a poorly soldered wire.
The mic sits less than a millimeter away from the diaphragm's dome. For all measurements the felt covering the electret's bore was removed.
The felt's effect was rather minimal, dropping level above ~2 kHz by about 3 dB. Removing it allowed me to move the mic closer to the diaphragm.

For software I used REW.

Spoiler: Measurements

Frequency Response:

Below 1 kHz all drop with roughly 3-4 dB/octave.
Taping the center vent has minimal influence apart from damping the main resonance at 100 Hz.
However, taping the surround slots increases level at 2 kHz rather significantly.
This 2k resonance is definitely not due to a rocking mode because it is present in the symmetric aswell as the asymmetric config.

As you can notice, symmetric has 3 dB less SPL at 20 Hz compared to the others.
This is likely because I couldn't manage to move the microphone close enough to the driver.
This type of near-field measurement is very sensitive to placement.
The small dips at 60 Hz and its multiples are likely due to my two friends.

Distortion:

It says 90 dB but whether this is actual SPL I cannont guarantee. For the sake of a relative comparison it should be close enough.
Both graphs look virtually identical except for the bass distortion which is clearly lower in the symmetric config.

To take a closer and less noise influenced look at the bass distortion I performed a Stepped Sine Measurement from 20 to 1000 Hz.
Settings:
1/12 octave steps, 4 averages, FFT length=131072
0 ms silence
69 measurement points
This is 10 dB higher level than the previous measurement:

Symmetric drops THD by about 5%

Conclusion:
I'd take this with a nice grain of salt because the setup is clearly not ideal.
Symmetric does appear to have less distortion, however this could very well be because of the level difference.
I say this because the stock, untouched, symmetric AKG driver performs very similarly compared to what I would call the worst case scenario for rocking:

Spoiler: stock measurements

Still wanted to share because REW in the background makes for some interesting bokeh and this is the driver pics thread after all.

Thanks for your input and effort, and yes big grain of salt, i have stocked up on.

 

[iFi audio]

@Katze²

Isn't your profession a mad scientist by any chance?

 

[bedlam inside]

Someone told us recently that: "Every audiophile into headphones will end up with a pair of Stax sooner or later and everything before this is just a road to get there".

Nuts!

"I'll try anything once, twice if I like it, three times to make sure."
Mae West
Am sure she was talking about Stax...

 

[Slater]

"I'll try anything once, twice if I like it, three times to make sure."
Mae West
Am sure she was talking about Stax...

Haha, keep in mind that Mae West said a lot of things that had double meaning lol

Maybe she was talking about Stax, but probably not haha

 

[Viber]

Just a small update on the golden "Tesla\T1" Drivers we discussed earlier.
I asked someone who bought those and he said those are definitely not T1 drivers as they are smoothed out in the treble department, Reminds him of his Nighthawk Carbons.
Other than that - zero distortion, balanced bass and organic mids.

 

[Slater]

Just a small update on the golden "Tesla\T1" Drivers we discussed earlier.
I asked someone who bought those and he said those are definitely not T1 drivers as they are smoothed out in the treble department, Reminds him of his Nighthawk Carbons.
Other than that - zero distortion, balanced bass and organic mids.

What’s the low end like?

Are they worth the $100 asking price?