The HD800 & HD800S thread

Why are high freqs lower without dust covers in your first figure? I would expect it the other way around.

 

Well, yes. But most of the time, there's still some similarity is what I'm trying to say.

Sorry. I hope I'm not coming across as arrogant or anything like that. I simply wanted to give an observation.

Maybe I just don't know that I'm being really grumpy, and I need coffee now to calm myself. Haha

You mean the dip? It's there because the ringing at the other freqs that sandwich it is just very bad. My experience has been that a dip is actually not very noticeable, whereas anything that's added on is actually very audible. In this case, extra ringing.

And on that note, that dip will simply get worse and worse as it gets eliminated by the complex reflection mechanisms inside the HD800. I guess that's why Axel Grell and his team didn't want to go the rug liner/et al route. But... all the same, one can eliminate the ringing by a lot without resorting to permanently destroy their HD800 drivers:



^ I will post instructions on how to do that in a short while. I've just been unsuccessfully trying to simplify the steps. Basically... every single plastic surface that is exposed inside the space between the driver and your ears must absolutely be covered.

 

The driver detail is not false but it has that diffuse field treble of false detail like a Beyer on top of the real detail if you get my drift for that extra kick in short term, in store listening sessions of classical music excerpts.

 

Oh, you mean that? Well, sometimes, it gives nice air, and that's pretty addictive to some folks, I won't lie. Making the HD800 darker by any amount will diminish that air immediately, unless the amp being used has really really really good transient control, and even then, it still won't sound as airy.

That's something I'd consider more like a "coloration" than "fake details".

 

So for fun I have been creating a profile in Ozone 5 that attempts a bit of tracking correction of the HD800. It starts with my -3.5 notch on the 6 Kh peak but adds back a 2db boost centered around 3 Kh and then a gradual bass boost up to 2 db. Actually it sounds quite good.

 

It is more natural sounding without the 2 db bass boost. The HD800 does not need it.

Just the -3.5 db (or -2.5 db) notch at 6 Kh is still my default but this boost at 3 Kh is interesting.

 

How do you address the bass rolloff below 60hz?

 

I do not. I am happy with the bass that I am getting from the HD800.

I use EQ because of the 6 Kh issue. It is an alternative to modding.

 

Check out the sonarworks extended profile posted. Basically, you need a really low low-shelf that kicks in at around 50 hz. See this picture for reference: https://www.dropbox.com/s/hj909zsd5gfkk9k/Screenshot 2015-10-29 11.30.32.png?dl=0

You do end up losing headroom and gaining distortion in the low bass.

 

Yes, I've tested that particular EQ with sonarworks. I don't like what it does to the midrange, but the low-bass is nice. Reminds me of planars. If the HD800 gains some distortion in the low bass, it's not much. I was asking cooperpwc, but he likes the bass as is.

 

I am very curious as to what sticky method is best to attach felt (or whatever) to all those small surfaces. I have an interesting material I am tempted to try using but no idea how to best attach it.

 

That air isn't there on the recordings, contributing to the weightless sound of the can. Maybe the best term would be "artificially revealing" though. Remember treble spikes are deliberately built into many monitoring headphones to highlight flaws in audio tracks as they're being recorded. The Sony V6/7506 sound like they do for a reason: they weren't designed for listening to music or tracking instruments, they were meant for live location recording of spoken word audio.

 

Double-sided tape. I'd recommend some form of micro-fiber cloth over felt. I've tried both, and preferred the cloth over felt. Felt has some weird reflection properties that I don't quite like.

Air and weight are both dependent on the amp as well. Technically, if the amp has good transient response (a la Stax), I think a headphone that has decent "speed" like the HD800 would sound fairly transparent and airy out of said amp, even when its treble is toned down.

I was discussing this with a friend the other day... that an amp that necessarily make a fairly flat headphone sound like a speaker can probably be designed. It may not measure well, and its distortion mechanism would probably look funky, but it'll sound good.

The thing is... the industry is too caught up on meaningless measurement numbers. It's all about "accuracy" or "precision" with them. There are only a handful of manufacturers who truly care about good sound (EC for instance).

 

I feel it's impossible to make a headphone that both sounds good, reflects the recording, and pleases everyone with everything. Not just genre, even different instruments tuned or recorded differently in the same genre.

DACs and even computer settings can also matter. I started to think HD 650 was severely air deprived a couple of weeks ago for a while until I remembered I had changed foobar's output to DirectSound for portable use with an HD 25. After changing it back to WASAPI into a brightish DAC (the ODAC) I feel the HD 650 is probably the "most speaker" headphone around even if I still feel it could use some more air with some recordings. I've learned to just accept it sounds the way it sounds.

Something about the HD 800 housing combined with the extra higher treble air just sounds very wrong to me, lower treble and presence region issues aside. The soundstage always seems artificially wide like the K7whatever or HD 598. Inaccurate to recordings but euphonic to some consumers when compared to the HD 580/600/650. Then we can actually get into the whacky presence regions in the AKGs, 600, and 800 that can cause funny stuff to happen with different notes/tunings. Suddenly higher, noodly guitar solos can sound almost "the guitarist runs up and sticks his tongue out like Spinal Tap" spaced to me or the mixing board guy decides that something's "smoking" and decides to turn the knob to the right a bit (or dime it) for that part. A sort of instrumental shoutiness so to speak.

Edit: Transparent as in the transducer accurately reflects the recording or the sound the transducer is putting out is transparent/ethereal/spectral and lacks weight? I think I misread your post but don't want to edit what I wrote above where I took airiness to be the upper treble. The weightlessness might be both the housing and quick transient response and Sennheiser extending the bass and neutralizing the treble and 6kHz spike might not do anything about it as you said.

 

Yeah. Agreed. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. What's advocated here is simply not that there exists such a thing, but that I think with the proper system synergy and everything else that follows, everyone can find their own solution that fits their listening style. Just like how some like the stock HD800. I opted to mod it because I couldn't find anything in existence that can do precisely what I want. That's also why some other folks mod it, I'm sure.

To me, the stock HD800 is bright, peaky, shouty, and diffused-sounding, with bloated one-note and kinda anemic bass. People can agree/disagree, but of the many HD800 systems I listened to (including my own), with the headphone being stock, that was always the case.

The lack of precise imaging (due to the diffusion) causes the soundstage of the HD800 to become nebulous to me, and since I can't pinpoint exactly where in the soundstage certain instruments or vocals are coming from, I tend to get frustrated, and the whole soundscape becomes ethereal/intangible. Lower level of bass, with it being one-note, also doesn't help either.

So yeah, I'd agree with you... that the HD650 with the right system does have some preferable qualities, in the sense that since it doesn't take things and space them so far apart, any amount of diffusion is acceptable, or not so noticeable. That's not to be confused with "veil", by the way. The new silver driver HD650, while sounding a bit on the warm/dark side to me, doesn't sound so veiled at all. Out of some higher-end amps, I actually have a hard time telling the HD650's lack of air relative to the HD800, except with things not spaced so far apart.

The thing is... the more I listen to the HD800, the more I realize that its soundstage is not so artificial, but rather that it's achieving a level of presentation that's different from whatever the usual suspects can do. And it does that so well that it seems out of place. There really is no other headphone that does soundstage quite like the HD800. When it's the only one of its kind, and everyone has gotten used to the "standard" headphone soundstage, you'd go and question whether or not the HD800 is "accurate". I know I have posed that question before. The conclusion I have reached is that... there really is no such thing as a "proper" way soundstage in anything "should" sound like. Soundstage, or reproduction of spatial and positional cues, as I think about it, was probably not captured well in some recordings to begin with (say, try closed-mic acoustic recordings), but it's not like any mastering engineer can completely remove those cues from a track entirely, so they'd always be there. Likewise, in a recording that intentionally tries to capture "soundstage", the thing we should realize is that those cues are all relative to the microphones and recording devices used in that setting. So... being that they are relative, and translated somewhat and mostly into what I'd consider "dynamic range", it is reasonable to assume that once you up the volume, which changes relative differences, or dynamic range, then all bets are off. Soundstage would then become as large as your listening level, and then other factors also come into play.

So... with all that said, I think it's all just about what you'd enjoy, and not what is technically more accurate. I enjoy the more intimate soundscape of my HD600 with some recordings, and then I enjoy some others with my HD800.

 

Diffuse spacing, nebulous, and bereft of positional cues is a good way to describe the HD 800's soundstage relative to speakers and other headphones.

I've even heard many completely slammed rock and metal records with decent soundstage but thin instruments due to the way in which the recording was compressed. Kick drums that are just a subbass thump with no drumming heard or guitars becoming a cloud of distortion rather than a distorted guitar but they will seem correctly spaced even if the instruments sound wrong.

 

Honestly, those are just my opinions, not facts. My ears may very well be tin.

I know for sure I have some mild amount of ringing in both ears that have persisted for years now, so that ringing may very well have affected/added on to whatever else the HD800 does in general.

And that's also not alluding or hinting anything at mods, of course. I just wanted to give my own reasons for attempting the mods to begin with. The mods may in fact not have changed anything,

The way I look at it, the HD800 is a love-hate headphone. I certainly didn't come to even like it for a long time until very recently. Modding it to change the tonality seems like sacrilege, but my intentions from the beginning were to simply shift it towards what I could tolerate more for some recordings, while attempting to retain the qualities that I like, rather than taking a horse and turning it into a rabbit. I honestly had no intention of turning the HD800 into a glorified LCD-3 with better housing and better comfort.

Otherwise, I could just take it stock, apply some EQ, and call it a day. That's certainly easier, and though EQ does impart its own set of... stuffs to deal with, I think it's adequate. The problem was that I never did quite come to like EQ in any shape or form with the HD800, hence... mods.

Yeah, right?

I think this is rather a fault of the recording than the headphone itself. In a way, low frequency info like drum vibrations, etc... are so poorly captured in some recordings that they don't come out at all. The end result is that something like the HD800 would end up sounding way too bright with such recordings. I guess this is why some say the HD800 needs super good recordings to shine.

The thing is... I like how the HD800 sounds, and I want to keep it like that for a larger portion of my library. (Yeah, I'm greedy. So sue me! )

But beside that, it's really just... enjoyment. HD600/650 is so enjoyable because the low freq info, even when not present, is "added in" as a "coloration" (IMO, it counts as "coloration", much like air counts as "coloration" to HD800), and in that sense, they tend to work better with those recordings than the HD800. HD800 really isn't the best headphone in the world to me. It's just the best for certain scenarios.

 

Well I was just talking about how poorly mastered in a certain way recordings sound in general, not what an HD 800 does to them. I have to run but the absolute worst sounding instruments on the HD 800 are sparkly, 1980s cymbals.