From an engineering perspective, hfm and stax differ in design in many aspects, the mesh stator alone cannot be used as a simple evaluation criterion. I would like to briefly discuss the following points:
1. Different Assembly Structures. Hfm uses glue to bond both spacers and stators, unlike stax driver house. Their assembly method also borrows from early Sennheiser and Sony design concepts, attempting to isolate the shell and driver vibrations through flexible coupling. In other words, if you disassemble any non-latest hfm headphone, you can see the driver is sandwiched between the EVA foam and panel on both sides. These three headphone assembly methods—"stax(driver house + rigid shell)," "senheiser、hfm(flexible coupling assembly)," and "completely ignoring vibration transmission"— will produce some differences in subjective listening, but these differences are not significant in the frequency response curve.
2. Different stator acoustic designs. Stax stator acoustic surface size is consistently significantly smaller than the diaphragm size. This design improves sensitivity a bit and also provides a gradient radial damping for the diaphragm. Limiting the acoustic surface size at the stator level is also one of the reasons why stax have a bit different image compared to other estats.
3. Different mesh counts. Stax uses lower mesh counts, such as 60-80 mesh in the Omega and x9000, while hfm uses higher mesh counts, around 300 mesh in the Shang JR/SR. Lower mesh counts result in more transparent sound waves, while higher mesh counts provide more uniform but higher damping, leading to audible differences in subjective listening, but there are no winners in this regard.
4. Different earpad and wearing design. This goes without saying, it greatly affects the sound of electrostatic headphones, and hfm and stax have almost opposite design philosophies.
5. Different diaphragm. Whether it's the thin film material itself(pet vs pps), the conductive coating, or tension, hfm and stax are all different.