[lantian]

Nice upgrades to the Luxman! Exactly the sort of thing I have done to a number of amps, including a 1960's Peak valve amp.

BTW, I have a friend of a friend who has 3D printed the Sennheiser pad rings! Just working out if it's worth exporting sets of them. They are a caramel colour and not black is all. Whatcha think?

Thanks, love this thing forgot to add all front panel controls are also bypassed, except for tone, it sits in feedback network. So had to leave it in. And signal cables are pure silver untill pot and from there pure gold, while ground cables are silver plated copper.
Amps from this period have fantastic sonics and in a lot of cases incredible potential for modifications.

Nice, good to know it's possible get replacement(won't be necessary for me, but a lot of people going to be very happy about this). New headbands would be amazing next step.

 

[Backsplash7]

I agree and that's something I have found often in recent years, I am not hankering for something beyond the HD540s. They are so accomplished at presenting music as an organic timbral event, full of life and emotional expression, that so many others have just sounded like detail-freaking hifi. I too now would probably just go straight to the top end gear, Meze Elite level with a whole new amplifier system and headphone cable to match ..... and still keep the venerable HD540 systems. I would, however, like to find a more suitable pair of cans for the QP1R when used as a portable, I don't like IEMs.

Uh oh, I think I might be in the freaky hifi camp...

 

[sennsay]

Uh oh, I think I might be in the freaky hifi camp...

We've all been there. No bad thing either, I still have very fond memories of a Sonic Frontiers SFL-1 preamp I repaired and upgraded and that thing was vivid! Wonderful with my hotrodded kit h/p amp, there are still a couple of tracks I've never heard sound quite that good since. I just prefer most things with more body now, you can actually have both. I would love to find another one of those SFL-1 preamps though! Strangely ... or not ... many of the really bright and clear/fast bits of kit are also quite shallow in their depth of soundstage, in my experience, and that in itself is still no bad thing, I've had many many hundreds of hours of fun with such gear.

 

[Backsplash7]

We've all been there. No bad thing either, I still have very fond memories of a Sonic Frontiers SFL-1 preamp I repaired and upgraded and that thing was vivid! Wonderful with my hotrodded kit h/p amp, there are still a couple of tracks I've never heard sound quite that good since. I just prefer most things with more body now, you can actually have both.

Both would be great! My goal at the moment though is to get as close to life as possible, which, granted, I'll never fully achieve, but it seems a logical place to start

 

[fredrikie]

Has anyone has good luck with replacement pads sounding close to stock other than the wang yifei ones from ebay?

 

[sennsay]

Has anyone has good luck with replacement pads sounding close to stock other than the wang yifei ones from ebay?

Scrolling back through recent pages ought to bring you plenty of material: try these for starters; https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/385131959368?var=653012870534
They have been considered close, though mine haven't arrived yet to give you any more information.

 

[Beagle]

Does anyone know a source for a replacement cable? I need one for my 560 Ovation which should be the same plugs as the 540.

 

[lantian]

Does anyone know a source for a replacement cable? I need one for my 560 Ovation which should be the same plugs as the 540.

What region?

 

[lantian]

If you want best stock Sennheiser cable then would recommend getting hd650 cable and with cutting of excess rüber from the headphone connectors

 

[sennsay]

New pad rings are made for me and in the mail, I'm looking forward to seeing how they fit, though they are apparently identical. I had two extra sets made in case I pick up another couple of models from this great era of headphones. One set will be for the new Grey1 BD pads when they arrive .... next month! Hmm, in that case, I may get another 3-4 ring sets made for future headphone purchases and pad choices, or on the off chance I damage one.
Currently listening to an album I've not heard for quite some time ... The Bee Gees final concert (I believe), One Night Live. Using the QP1R as source and FrankenZero as the DAC (with OPA627 opamps) and the main HD540 Ref1s with wang pleather pads, the soundstage is huge, way out wide and deep, with some sounds almost appearing to come from behind my ears and individual calls from the audience coming from everywhere and crystal clear. As is a tambourine that is hit softly right at the very back of the stage, yet all the little cymbals are easy to hear despite the rest of the band in full swing. Brilliant. Many tracks don't have heavy percussion, but when the drum kit does come in it explodes with weight and impact well behind the three singers. I think this show was the last one with three of Bee Gees, and their individual voices are quite distinctive.
A real demo album with brilliantly recorded music on it (all done in various hotel rooms around the world on DAT) is Tony Levin's fabulous World Diary. If you have it (it can be hard to get now) try the track called I Cry To The Dolphined Sea, holy moly does the saxophonist, a guy called Bendik, play that instrument! From the opening sultry low notes he moves into one heck of a performance, wailing and crying, it's stunning to hear. Despite the wonderful drama with it, the sax should not come at you in the highs! It stays put and is all the more dramatic for it. It's been a top track of mine for many years. Great to test out speakers too.

 

[ArChaos]

It looks like the BD pad seller has got the supply back under way and the order has now been shipped after all. Weird, but ok. I only hope the whole order has been sent and not just the one set of pads.

Happy to hear they are finally on their way... I was very busy last week, so I even hadn't have the time to write him back to ask about my (and your) orders. By now I did it, he came back to me and promised to resend me the right pads. By the way, the ones I have (and reordered) are the Black1 and the ones you ordered are the Gray1 - there is a small chance they are not exactly the same velour, so I asked him, if possible, to resend me one Black1 and one Gray1, instead of two Black1s. If he does it, I can check if the sound I get with my Black1 is the same with the Gray1's and I will let you know.

Besides, nice to hear that you've got yourself the new rings to easily snap them in place.

 

[sennsay]

My second, and last, set of original Sennheiser pads, filmed still alive - just - in October of 2017. A bit faded and rather 'long in the tooth', as the saying goes, beginning to fray around the edges, the inner foam now gone and replaced by the white felt until new foams arrived. Soft, delicious pads.
Wang velours tried briefly, the horror was too much and so the pleathers went on instead. So much better! Not quite sure whether that cable is an HD650 one or the cheap replacement Sennheiser Australia sent me, probably the latter, in which case it also disappeared very quickly, some of the life went out of the music, so I returned to the original steel cable. Again, much better. After I had made my Merkel mods to the Denon AH-D1000 cans, which used Mogami #2893 cable as a part of the mods, I then made my first set for the HD540s, and so the love affair for a cable that did not colour or alter the free flow of musical goodness began.

 

[Backsplash7]

I have just completed one of the more esoteric changes to my setup so far, but one which I really ought to have thought to tackle sooner. As a pc audio listener, something I have been accustomed to for a long time is the background noise of the machine, whirring away, but since getting the qed power cables, this background noise level has been much more noticeable, to the point of seriously bothering me. Using a decibel meter on my phone (oh yes, specialist equipment) I was able to point directly half of the blame on the pump for my water cooler, and half the blame on the mechanical hard drives.
I now have an old fashioned heatsink, with a surprisingly slow running fan (I had to reconfigure my bios because it runs too slowly to detect that its plugged in) and have moved my music onto a solid state drive, and tinkered with windows until my hair turned blue, trying to stop it from constantly spinning up the hard discs for no reason... something that was only semi successful, as whenever my freezer turns on or off, it wakes those drives up again. Not sure how to stop that from happening at the moment.
But when those discs do finally go to sleep, the decibel meter registers 7-12db during the night, and reacts quite readily to my breathing. Before I did all of this, the background noise was similar to having a microwave on in the room. Amazing what your brain can learn to block out after a while!

It certainly does make a difference, I wasn't expecting it to feel like quite so much of an upgrade, but it really is a heck of a lot easier to hear things now. When a song moves into a quiet passage, or ends with a slow fade out, I can now hear it go all the way to the bottom, instead of getting lost behind that white noise in the room, which is lovely, and its easier to get lost and all relaxed with the music. I can generally pick things up more easily now, there's a real sense that I will never need to strain to catch something, which is cool. But something I didn't expect was to be experiencing what feels like more bass and more impact: in one orchestral track in particular there was a large and deep drum that finally received a solid wallop and the punch really jumped out at me, and I felt that in my chest, going down very low.
Apparantly silence is golden

 

[sennsay]

Upgrades come in all shapes and sizes, eh Power supplies are the No 1 item to get right in any bit of kit, start there (Nelson Pass, Burson Audio and others) and the rest will follow. Glad you now have a much quieter background in which the music can be performed.
My KHA headphone amp uses an Audio-gd Class A power supply with unlimited grunt for such a device, the upgrades I have done to my venerable 1976 Perreaux SP100 preamp (with it's Class A headphone amp) improved from already good to 'crikey!' once I had upgraded all the PS caps to Nichicon's KG Gold Tune models. Again, it's the bass that sets the stage for the rest of the music, get that right and rest of the frequency range has a great foundation from which to flourish, it's not everything, but crucial towards a complete performance.

 

[Backsplash7]

Upgrades come in all shapes and sizes, eh Power supplies are the No 1 item to get right in any bit of kit, start there (Nelson Pass, Burson Audio and others) and the rest will follow. Glad you now have a much quieter background in which the music can be performed.
My KHA headphone amp uses an Audio-gd Class A power supply with unlimited grunt for such a device, the upgrades I have done to my venerable 1976 Perreaux SP100 preamp (with it's Class A headphone amp) improved from already good to 'crikey!' once I had upgraded all the PS caps to Nichicon's KG Gold Tune models. Again, it's the bass that sets the stage for the rest of the music, get that right and rest of the frequency range has a great foundation from which to flourish, it's not everything, but crucial towards a complete performance.

They certainly do come in all sizes, and once again, I am appreciating the importance of every component having its own impact on the whole. I came back to this today and listened to something different, and went for something much louder and heavier, whereas the previous session I'd deliberately gone for quieter and more spaced-out recordings instead, but now I am convinced that the depth and impact of the bass, detail and separation have all actually improved, and not just by virtue of the background noise being lower: something I can say with some confidendence, as this quietening exercise has been a three-stage process, with gradual reductions in volume and listening sessions after each time I fiddled with my computer. I really am quite surprised by how much control and power I'm hearing in the bass now, that was the very last thing I had expected from all of this.
I had briefly experimented with testing the effects of a hard drive versus a solid state drive for playing back stored music a while ago, when my setup was simpler and not as revealing, and I'd not heard a difference back then, so had quickly abandoned the idea and concluded that it wasn't something that could really help; if there was a difference, it wasn't one that I could hear at the time. Now though, seeing as the storage drive is essentially my source, it would make sense that it could be quite important to get that right. All I can imagine is that the difference lies between the digital controller on the SSD and the spinning disc and mechanical needles moving on the HDD. Perhaps the contact point between the platter and needles are a potential source of noise or interference, or perhaps there is a difference in the speed of the transfer of data that is only really appreciable in this very specific sort of application.
I suppose the moral of the story is that never hurts to go back and retrace your steps every once in a while!