OMG HD800S! Actually f'ing awesome and the naysayers were assholes

haha i meant as a way of reviewing it I can't wait to get my hands on it too and are almost a instant purchase for me since am a hd800 guy and a upgrade itch is on me and I liked the HE1000 but not enough to take the plunge on them as i felt the hd800 still has it points but a better hd800 is just what i need dont know about the lcd4 but i doubt am willing to go for that unless there atleast noticeably better than the hd800s which i doubt they are

 

4k for a Audeze fazor can vs 2k for a dampened HD 800...

 

if only I was audiophile enough to get the audeze fazor reference but the dampened hd800 I guess your right but if it sounds better isn't that what matters in the end? because in the innerfidelity review anax mod HD800 won against the HE1000 where i doubt the stock would have so if these are even better than the anax mod then aren't we in for a treat?

 

heres a quick summary


Audeze = Fazor = Cheap plastic things that are suppose to even out the fq but actually reduce the bass slam and make your ears hit them while wearing the can

Sennheiser = fancy german resonator (aka couple pieces of foam in the hd800s driver) = more equal frequency response and extended high and low (apparently)

Hifiman = window shade system = literally took a piece of mesh used on a window and cut it to size and put over the driver

 

haha thanks they have been added to my dictionary but again lets see man that foam really might be the final touch you know because the hd800 drivers them selves without resonance and such are near perfect from what i've seen from the measurements or am i wrong?

 

Basically you have to roll off the sub bass somewhere so the headphone doesn't feel like it's boxing your ears like an HD 280 or something. The Fazors do not roll off the bass, they shelve it at a certain point. They also have a strange, plastic closed can timbre that's unacceptable for thousand dollar plus open headphones. Oh and they still have spotty quality control.

 

Why? They don't care if people try to replicate it. The goal isn't to get Hd800 owners to buy new headphones, it's to make the Hd800 more appealing by fixing its well known flaws.

 

Finally managed to register although there aren't much things to add to the thread. Thune was bang on, Axel said the tuned absorber was a direct inspiration from the work done on the ie800.

I saw Tyll's post about the 1/4 wavelength thing but I am not sure this is it. The equivalent of a helmhotz resonator in mechanical world is the tuned mass/spring damper. The felt in the center ring provides the damping, the depth of the neck defines the moving mass, the entrapped air in the ear-cup defines the stiffness (compliance of a column of air if you will).

I find it brilliant actually because it seems they managed to extend the low end and the high end at the same time as taming the upper mids peak. I haven't followed anax mods in detail but I know my own melamine foam mod was a bit miserable in terms of preserving the top end sparkle of the ring transducer...

Cheers, arnaud

 

Hey Arnaud,
nice to see you here, finally!

 

I don't agree, the idea of better bass extension is a key factor for me considering the hd800S.

 

Note I said somewhere. If you go low and loud enough, a headphone's artificial reproduction of subbass frequencies will be extremely damaging to hearing. The loud night club chest thumps are also incredibly bad for your ears and can't be blocked with earplugs.

The better open dynamic headphones start rolling of at about 100 Hz but obviously the DT 880, AKG K7whatever, and HD 800 don't roll off a steeply as an HD 650. The HD 580 onward series was still a lot better than the HD 540 1980s Sennheiser stuff that started rolling off at 200 Hz.

 

Do you have a source?, Why would a linear response be an 'artificial reproduction' of lower frequencies?

This is a characteristic of most open-backed dynamics due to limitations in coupling and transducer technology (mostly surround diameter). The 'better' orthodynamic and electrostatic headphones do not show such roll-off because most of them feature a larger diaphragm. Once again, why is this bad?

 

What is 'artificial reproduction' of the sub-bass frequencies? Do some of these headphones have vacuum cleaners inside of that suck your ear-drums out creating the sensation of low bass? I could see that being damaging.

 

As Spoony said, there are orthos with no bass roll-off. They sound great.

If you go loud enough, anywhere in the FR, you'll get hearing loss. Mammals tend to hearing loss at 4khz (mice as well as men) and treble hearing loss is much more common than loss in the bass (although, that is possible, too).

I seriously doubt that most headphone designers are doing anything at all out of a concern for people's hearing.

One example of a common that has indeed changed its tuning for hearing protection is Future Sonics, they make ciems and iems. The change they made is to _Increase_ sub-bass and the sub-bass is actually increasing all the way to 10hz, rather than rolling off, on some models. The reason is that they found people don't get a real "air-moving" bass feel with sealed shell BA designs and they were turning up the volume to compensate (and then getting wrecked by the treble spikes inherent in most BA designs). Having a vented dynamic driver with sub-bass extension helped alleviate this phenomenon.

 

Physics. Actual subbass sound waves are much too long for a headphone driver to reproduce. The drivers just approximate the inaudible subfrequencies that you can't hear but can feel through your inner ears and bone conduction. Very low tones coming from a huge, accurate subwoofer will feel very different than from a planar headphone. Too much of the real thing or the approximation will damage your hearing. That huge, body shaking EDM bass is awful for you.

20 Hz is already chest thump territory that you need special mics to capture like the Yamaha kick ones. The ideal open headphone subbass extension/approximation would be linear (The Harman curve bass boost sounds boomy and unnatural) and start rolling off in rumble territory (around 25 Hz at the lowest) or so to keep some punch but not too much for the most natural sound. Otherwise you may get into unnatural boominess/ear boxing territory like the pre-fazor LCD-2/3 and Focal Spirits. Open, dynamic headphones will never have this problem of course.

Also, for IEMs and closed headphones have boosted subbass is because no matter how good the isolation is, you can't physically block out those external chest thump and below frequencies and they want people to feel the approximation of them through the monitors in the noisy situations where IEMs and closed headphones may be used without turning everything else up as you said.

 

Again, where's the source for this? Obviously high SPL at any frequency can be damaging, but why are low frequencies critical?

Sorry, bit this sounds like a whole lot of opinion to me. While I can't argue against you disliking the Harman curve, where's the data pointing to bass roll-off being necessary for 'realistic' or 'safe' sound reproduction in headphones?

 

Dr. John Moulton of Noble Audio has pointed to research (iirc out of an Aus. University) showing that added sub-bass response sounds more natural to test subjects, not less. I'm not sure that speaks to the topic precisely, though.

I'm interested in the source for your assertion that headphone drivers are unable to reproduce 20hz accurately. Of course, a PA system will feel different than a headphone, but that doesn't mean the headphone is inaccurate. I'm happy to learn more about it.

Why would a 20hz tone represent a safety issue on a properly dampened closed dynamic headphone and not on an iem? Again, a high enough SPL at any frequency can cause hearing loss. Further, how does this idea account for the much greater occurence of hearing loss in treble frequencies versus bass?
Thanks.