edstrelow

Headphones without a headband, what is the world coming to? Actually some of you are giving me too much credit for discovering resonance issues in headbands and headphones. As best I can tell Sennheiser got there first by using some "space age material" in the headband of the HD800. a couple of years before I started putting sorbothane on the headband of a Stax SR007A. Not being a Senn person I didn't know about this. Now if there was no crossfeed from the earcups, putting damping in a headband should not work. Evidently the good folk at Senn thought they were on to something. My more recent posts, elsewhere, referenced some info raised by another member who found that both Audioquest and B&W were damping their phones and explaining it in terms of eliminating crossfeed. So add in the Grado e-series and you are up to at least 4 companies doing mechanical damping (although Grado talks about improving transient response, not crossfeed.) Don't get me wrong (as I am sure some will.) While I am sure crossfeed is problem, there are still resonance issues even if you take away the headband, which was the point of listening to some Lambdas without their headband, as a way to stop crossfeed. So I wouldn't spend too much money on most TOL's since most are obsolete. If the new Sennheiser stat is using damping like the HD 800 then you are ok there. Or don't worry about it but buy some sorbothane ( I recommend 1/4 inch self-stick 70 duro BTW) and figure out how to improve the sound on whatever phones you get. Did I mention it only costs a few dollars?

Don't waste your money on these, or Stax for that matter. Only now are manufacturers starting to deal with the problems of mechanical vibrations in the housing. Sennheiser seems to have been the first with the use of damping material in the headband of the HD800. I would assume their new electrostatic does the same. Grado is using proprietary polcarbonate in its e series and claims, probably correctly, that it improves transient performance. Audioquest and B&W are using damping in their phones and claiming it reduces mechanical crosstalk between the earcups. My experience, from applying sorbothane to earcups and headbands, confirms these claims. There is a lot of acoustic energy floating around earcups, which harms performance in many ways. The benefits of effective damping are quite large. In something like the Sennheiser stat, damping is probably going to be the major advantage over the Stax line. If Senn hasn't damped that phone, then a sorbed Stax 007 or 009 should outperform it.

Did you check for electrical continuity of the cable connections? Any problems like this I have had were cable issues.

I tried this mod back in the day and found that it did add a lot of bass, but so much as to make the phones unlistenable.

Cool.

Can you turn a low bias unit into a pro just by increasing the thickness of the spacer (and rewiring the plug?)

We might know if we had an ionophone headphone for comparison. These use no diaphragm at all. I saw an ionophone speaker at an audio shop in SoCal some years ago. However it wasn't working.

I am only interested in whether the phones themselves are any better than say the Stax SR009 or SR007, or my personal favorites the Sigma/404S ( where S stands for modified with sorbothane damping. ) Suspiciously Sennheiser has made this evaluation difficult if not impossible since even if you can get past its DAC you apparently can't avoid the amplification in the earcups ( and we assume it is only straightforward amplification and not some euphonic signal processing.) A better comparison would be one of the above phones range hooked up to $52,000.00 of top class dac and amplifier. I just don't like the concept of being stuck with an integrated system, and a very expensive one at that. It kind of reminds me of Bose' marketing ploys. "Trust us we make great stuff" If I had that kind of dough to splash around I would rather put together my own system components.

$55,000 or is it Euros gets you a modern version of the Koss ESP6. With the proprietary amp in the earcups (Koss used transformers) I doubt that anyone will be able to assess the headphones by themselves because the proprietary stuff will be in the way.

A 009 user from Finland is arguing for changes in the sonic signature of these foams produced by changing the foam material.

So what do you think is the explanation for this effect?

I guess I did miss his evaluation "FWIW ... I found this 600LE amplifier (whacked out mods and all) to be far better sounding (for my tastes) than was my recently sold 323S and specifically with my 404LE's ... better bass, super sweet highs and overall just a more lively, and engaging listen; it's certainly a far different sound than was the 323S, which I didn't dislike but which, in retrospect, seemed a bit thin/cold compared to the 600LE." So what we have here is a poorly executed job which still sounded good. Of course the issue would be how it sounds compared to an unmodified 600LE, which we don't know. Still I am glad you got the problem resolved to your satisfaction.

I take the point about the misrepresentation, the mods should have been mentioned since these are relevant to the value of the item. However, before I would fight over it, I would try to decide if the amp is any good. Unless I missed it I didn't see your opinion about the sound quality.

I have not been too tempted on the 009's, in part because many reviews have been somewhat equivocal: things like you need both an 007 and an 009. At any rate I am sending large monthly cash transfusions to my 2 girls who are both in college in the San Francisco Bay area. This soaks up most of the free money for new phones. And then I have also been playing with sorbothane damping on my various Staxen as I have reported on the other site. This is a cheap and fairly easy way to fiddle the sound of these phones. I am coming to the conclusion that probably all headphones suffer from a lack of damping. You just can't do the things with phones that you can with speakers, i.e. make heavy, rigid boxes, spiked to the ground. Accordingly there is a lot of coloration which I only realized when I tried the damping. I have good results now with the Lambdas(404 and LNS), SRX3 pro, SR 003 and most recently the 007. I have still not come up with a good way to damp the Sigmas, partly because there are few locations to attach the sorbothane. I have been particularly pleased with the damped Lambdas and these and the SRX3 pros have been getting most of my listening for the last months. I will be at the big headphone conference in Orange County California at the end of March with 2 or more set-ups to show these tweaks. For those not familiar with Southern California, this is about 20 miles from LA and close to Disneyland.