I have only tried the Brainwavz leather pads (flat, 30 mm high, 110x90 mm outer and 70x50 mm inner diameters).
Warning: they are oval, and the shorter diameter is too small, so makes it a very tight fit on the 007, kind of heavily stretched.
It does sound slightly better on the 007 than the black Stax EP-007 pads. However, on other headphones (such as the TH900), the Stax pads sound better.
But on the 007 the 009 pads sound still better, and my modded 009 pads sound much better.
Measurements are not giving things justice, since they are usable up to a few kHz, at least with the rig generally used by hobbyists (miniDSP UMIK-1 + REW + DIY coupler); nevertheless when used comparatively, they give an idea.
As seen above, the Brainwavz leather pads have less midrange dip than stock 007 pads.
When compared to my modded 009 pads, the difference in sound is bigger than in measurements (especially in bass where the 009 pads are much better sounding than comparative measurements would tell):
A few notes:
- The bass drop below 50 Hz in form of a step is a coupler thing, not noticed on my head when doing a frequency sweep: using slightly bigger pressure of the pads on the coupler make it flat, but since that is hard to control, I stay with the step.
- The treble raggedness is mainly coming from measurement setup limitations. It gives an idea, and more or less matches with my subjective evaluation, but take it with some reservations.
- The impulse response is slightly better with the modded 009 pads than with the Brainwavz, which is slightly better than the stock 007 pads.
- Distortions are almost the same, the 009 pads have slightly less distortions on odd harmonics than the others, but compensate with more on even harmonics, so while the THD is nearly the same, the 009 pads will sound slightly fuller and more musical.
I have asked Brainwavz whether they would make pads on my specifications (slightly angled shallow pads, slightly bigger horizontal diameters than the HM5 pads), but they don't. Of course these are replacement pads on their own headphones, and they don't want to make money on pads alone.
Since the HM5 pads were not really good on the TH900 either (see
this post), probably I am going to modify them myself, rather than throwing them out or selling.