Austrian Audio Hi-X65

Purchased this little fella over the weekend. I went to a headphone meet in Seoul over the weekend, and there were stuff like Susvara and Shangrila and what have you.. (I hated them by the way. The treble... ouch...) but I was really surprised by what this can do better than all the crap at the meet, so I really had to get it to try plugging it into my system.
I really like the tonality. Aside from small peaks in the sound here and there, quite an all rounder. A huge plus is that it can just be run off my DAP and sound pretty cool. Huge minus? Doesn't have balanced outputs... sad...

But curiosity got the better of me. This is not enough.... we gotta open this thing up! For science!! And modding.
Just to put it out there, I haven't fully explored the sound changes yet, this is moreso for people trying to open it up. So I'm purposely keeping the sonic impressions not very detailed.

Alright, how do you open it? Well,
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NbRtuWgoGeQHmz4t9ZCXHNgCNl85VcH6/view?usp=sharing

so there are these small tabs on the earcup. There are 12 in total and you have to pry them out.
(The mistake I made is applying horizontal pressure on these things. You have to apply only vertical pressure, because essentially the pad is made out of three parts- the base plate if you will, the foam, and leather that encloses the foam. And that leather is bound to the base plate by... glue. And, horizontal pressure tears that bonded area by the plate, and it leaves the foam exposed bare. I fixed my mistakes though.. glue again, but I would rather not make this mistake in the first place at all.. pads are super expensive for this guy. )

If you get the pads off you are left with a foam plate that says either L or R. Well, these are held on by 3M tape... so for science there is no choice but to tear them away. Luckily the foam sticks back pretty okay, the adhesive is still sticky enough.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ju-iohbuGbA6SvuopjRjIQxNOkWS3-SZ/view?usp=sharing

I knew I would be opening these up a lot so I just made holes into the foam. Can't be tearing the foam away every time, even 3M has its limits..
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1x5xpoiEcAgvTEJg5yOLIYEg7mfVlf4t_/view?usp=sharing

OK, this is how it looks opened up.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GQZ1fomZ-sCkmsFJeV5HkiyZUwL6KKDU/view?usp=sharing

That looks like a good spot for some damping... ooh..
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RvZ2J8B0g8VdTCTqAllV2RW3MvJt-VqA/view?usp=sharing
Duly applied.

Results were.. underwhelming. There was an increase in lows but the highs became quite harsh. Maybe tons of blu tac wasn't a good idea.
So they were decreased.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WaUcfyBFRnWfpRFbvJ0qvhPCGYtf1-7d/view?usp=sharing
The highs improved. But still quite peaky, so even more was decreased.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tHe_2d9tN2vNw4KPGPgasZkut-r3ZSLG/view?usp=sharing
This was quite good, but the highs still showed a bit of harshness. Hm. Maybe it's best left alone..

So I decided to go with something more indirect.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ht1Le0L9kdbXSEjOFauZFqN67cjlXlty/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1g63iYPZA4Xz9lq6G33vdnR1lsqalE03k/view?usp=sharing
And this is how they sit right now. I think I'm pretty happy with the sound for now. Maybe I'll get some more tape to the inner chamber later!