Won't tip over.

What added audio? ANC doesn't add anything.I understand you read how ANC works and got scared of it. I can assure you that there is nothing unnatural or unusual in this process. Sounds cancel other sounds all the time. When you speak, your voice bounces off other things and people and gets partially cancelled. When a guitar plays, it cancells some of it's own frequencies, which is why it has it's characteristic timbre. Cancellation means being quieter just like absorption or isolation. If you have a positive pressure and a negative pressure in the same space, they cancel out and you're left with no change in pressure. Just peaceful silence with no side effects.

Think of it this way - if it's getting colder, but you turn on heating, you have constant temperature. It's exactly the same with ANC, except the change is happening very fast. Since 'you turn the heater on and off' just as fast, the temperature is constant and your room cosy. Sound works in the same way, just instead of heat, there are tiny changes in pressure. ANC keeps the pressure constant and on the same level as outside the headphones. To your ears it's very relaxing.

I also like working if it's fullfilling. I just don't want to work if the entire point is funding some sociopath's perversions.

I don't think I missed a thing. You just want me to judge the guy. Nope.If he likes more bass, he needs headphones with more pressure capacity. You can praise the HD560s if you want, whatever. If you convince him to give them another chance and live with them anyway it's fine, if not - that's fine too.

I was describing them in the context of his message, which is related to headroom. Headroom doesn't care how the bass is tuned. It can be 6db below baseline, as long as there's headroom, it'll deliver. HD560's are the same kind of driver-earcup-earpad combination as other Senns and it doesn't have any more headroom. It's tuned differently, but the displacement just isn't there for bassheads.

Refer to distortion plots to see how HD560s is more stressed than HD660 for example. If you tune the bass up, you get less headroom - as simple as that. If someone is a heavy listener, then no amount of petty remarks towards them will change the fact that there is no replacement for displacement.

It says on the tin :) So either the goal is reached or their opinion got informed by the marketing material. By the way the ad, they made is really sus in the way it exploits that musical-genre-type of elitism that metal heads get into.

HD560s have a typical 40mm driver and they have as much bass potential as a 40mm headphone of this particular type can deliver.

Sonys are a middle sized SEALED headphone. Such type of headphones have it easy to reproduce bass, but sucks at other things such as fidelity and comfort during heat.

The Senns are an open, hifi headphones. They focus on openness, fidelity and long listening comfort. The reason they don't have as much low end headroom is because of the pads they're using. These velour pads are leaky. The purpose of this leakyness is to 'drain' standing waves inside of the earcup and have some air circulation and not irritate your skin. This is paramout for sound quality and long listening session comfort. It's only limitation is the bass. If it's not for you, it's not for you.

The reason you hate it is because you made an uninformed purchasing decision.

There are very good reasons to use two or more transducers.Dynamic transducers are cheap and lightweight. Unfortunately when you use one driver, then it needs displacement to play bass and phase accuracy to play highs. The former requires big size, the latter small size, or you'll get destructive modes all over FR.

So far we arrived at a consensus that 40mm driver is the golden compromise, however the bass will roll off and it doesn't look good in the marketing material. That's why 50mm driver are being marketed towards the "casual consumers". They have more displacement, but are bad at everything else and really only work with waveguides.

So you want to split the signal. The problem is that you need to find the actual drivers. Not only that, once you find the drivers of the right size, they need to make some quality noise. This is difficult, but it doesn't end there. The high quality drivers need to be mass manufactured or else the headphone will cost a fortune. So you end up using whatever basket of sketchy parts you can collect. In this case it seems like they found some Chinese earbud speakers, which probably were too small to cross them to the big boys, so they had to use two of them. Two drivers have more output and if they're small enough, they play like one driver. I probably sound very critical here, but this is actually how you design good audio.

The big boys still play quite high IMO, but what do I know. Optimally you want the bass to be completely separated from the rest but, as above, it's not always viable.

With drivers as small as theirs, they probably realised that they can reorient them so they're playing with the idea of HRTFing the driver's response. The important part is that they are as close to your ear canal as possible.

When you use multiple drivers of the same kind, the costs go down. Sometimes that's the difference maker. There's this company that makes loudspeakers out of tweeters. They can undercut other manufacturers and that's why they're popular.

In the past a headphone like this was not a viable option. Today we're getting to the point, when energy efficient and highly integrated chips can handle devices like these. The goal right is to find that secret sauce.

They're playing with interesting ideas. The video doesn't make the whole argument for that type of headphone and you see on the graph that they didn't fix all the problems in their FR at least in this prototype. Standing waves still make it difficult to reproduce high frequencies accurately.

One idea that I like is that they're splitting the signal into two bands which will help reduce intermodlation. That means that even when the drivers play bass loudly, frequency response in the upper range is not being altered by it.

I'm personally not interested in getting high frequency transducers to the front. I prefer to have them as close to your ear as possible.

I also like that they are not too big, which helps with low frequency extension. I'm afraid they might be heavy.

We will see how it evolves. The first iteration likely will have issues, but two models down the line they might squeeze some performance out of it.

Yes they do, but do these two things sound so similar that they deserve common name? I think we need to talk about audiophile dictionary in a more critical way, or else it'll continue to be just poetry. Poetry is nice, but for communication's purpose, it's interpreted with more disciplined language. It would be cool to have some intermediary terms that help us with interpretation and link physical phenomena to casual talk.

I'd like to add something that I've been always pointing out. Headphone audiophile speak came from speakers. Words like 'soundstage' are far more descriptive with speakers than with headphones. No wonder, newcomers are often confused. Not everyone imagines headphone soundfield as a stage, more often as a bubble.

This is different to what other people are describing online. PEople say that a subwoofer has slow bass...

It's just an inacurate language.
IF it's not bass that's doing it, then it's not slow bass. It's everything else that you described.

>Communicating ideas by language effectively depends on everyone involved possessing a common baseline of experiences, particularly anything involving the senses.

Audiophilia is like that, but audiophiles are trying to communicate things WAY more subtle than the resolution of their 'common baseline of experiences'.
At least if they knew well what they're talking about, they wouldn't say that somehitng has slow bass, if having a darker sound or quiet upper range is the same thing.

You should try vintage lens.

A more honest title: "Orban wears a scarf. It must be cold. It has the same old graphic and no one cares"

I've had generic Nicehck with a brown cable that sounded like a dream. Warm and euphonic with some extra top end. The best part of earbuds is that you can swap sponges and get different sound. The ones that I had sounded just right when you punched holes in the middle.

I have a big medium-hard shell case like this one:
https://ae01.alicdn.com/kf/S356c7071a4a043a1b2428e2a492779b1U/Du-y-zestaw-s-uchawkowy-futera-do-przenoszenia-s-uchawek-Earpads-worek-do-przechowywania-pokrowiec-na.jpg_Q90.jpg_.webp

It was $10 or something like this. It fits pretty big headphones in it. If I put Blon B8 or Fostex T40RP in there, then there's still free space inside.

Every speaker transducer is inherently balanced. You can run it with a so called 'balanced' (technically differential) signal. You just need a separate 'minus' wire for each headphone cup. Normally left and right are connected somewhere in the wiring to save on wire strands. Normal cable has only three strands, because the ground wire from left and right is shared. You need to identify where it is and circumvent this part. For example if it's a Y-split cable, then the connection must be in the cable. So you replace the cable with a 'balanced' one and you're good to go. If your headphone has a socket, but only on one side, then the connection is in the cup and you need to open it and modify it so that you can solder a cable with separate 'minus' strands. The socket may for example have only three pins in which case you need to get rid of it

I got a broken T40RP. It's less sought after, but basically the same thing without vents. With mods you can get to similar state. Having a damaged cable made it rather cheap.

T50RP has a very well executed mod thread on Head-fi. Just search for it and you'll see that the effect is quite easy to reproduce. Half the recipe is Shure pads. The other half is taking the cloth off the driver and some less important details.

You are simply used to the sound, you were listening for years. That's how it works. Stay open for new experiences, listen to live performance, give the new sound a chance for a while, or just stick with what you have. Whatever makes you happy.

This is an interesting question. I was thinking for a while about it and came to conclusion that I haven't heard many headphones outside of the mainstream hifi. The ones that I've heard were way more deliberate that I could ever make them, except for Grado. The Grados I heard years ago were like hearing aid. I guess people with hearing impairment can have their hifi too.

Most pointless products that I bought however must be some multi-driver Chi-fi earphones. Really badly executed products from TRN and KZ. I keep them stored in hope that some day I'll retune them.

I was also disappointed with Shure. Not bad, not terrible, just uninteresting. You can see how many popular products in hifi were iterated even 10 times before reaching high status. Sennheiser is an example. I used to have their HD545 which was to a degree a precursor to HD600. You can see a clear direction of development there. They not only know what they are doing. They persisted for a long time. Same applies to KEF in the speaker world. Refinement takes time.

Most small manufacturers either make planar drivers, or use freeedge dynamic drivers found in Denon, Fostex and Creative. They're available online. You can have fun with them too and have a no-bullshit set of cans :)I'm personally happy with modded Fostex T40RP. Nothing too fancy, but gets the work done.

You are not alone. No one understands phase. I think Scott Hinson wrote an article on this, but I have yet to read it. Phase is a very abstract term that means time. But it's not time measured in arbitrary units like seconds, but in waves. A wave can have any propagation time so saying 0.5ms delay doesn't tell you much. However if you say "the length of 2khz wave, which is at the same time half the length of 1khz" then you can start imagining what that delay is going to do to your frequency response simply knowing how waves combine. As I said it's an abstract term and consequently we can apply it to different situations. For example phase cancellation suggests that there are two sources. One makes positive pressure, the other makes negative pressure and they end up working hard and achieving nothing. These two things can be anything. For example two halves of a diaphragm. Grab a sheet of paper and hold it flat in one hand. Move it up and down slowly. The paper should flex a little but generally move with your hand. The suspended part of your diaphragm is in phase with your hand. Now as you speed up, it starts to bend. At certain very specific pace, the end of this sheet will flap up when your hand goes down and vice versa. It'll be out of phase. When your hand makes positive pressure the suspended paper makes negative pressure. When these pressure regions propagate, they expand into each other and to a large degree cancel. Here your hand is driver's motor and the far end is diaphragms edge or suspension. Other examples of a phase issue can be waves bouncing back and forth between the driver and the back enclosure, effectively impeding it's movement. It can be some part of the enclosure ringing also out of phase with the driver. In these cases the propagated sound coming back is the second source. Phase issues are deeply connected with resonances. A resonance can be out of phase with it's energy source. Engineers often use that to their advantage for example Helmholtz resonator is a phase reversing device that is used to extend bass in a bass reflex enclosure. The air in the port is out of phase with the back of a driver inside the enclosure, consequently in phase with it's front. We like when this happens :) The last phase issue that comes to my mind is quite tricky. It comes from driver being relatively big to the wave that it makes. It's called directivity because it works in such a way that depending on the angle from which you listen to the speaker, it's frequency response will change. It will change because there will be travel distance differences between various points on the driver. The far part of the driver makes pressure that has to travel more to reach you and by the time it reaches the pressure from the close part of the driver, they are out of phase (on some specific frequency or frequencies). This is especially a problem on expensive headphones with big drivers. In speakers we fix that with so called phase plugs - obstacles that force selected parts of the wave to take longer paths.

I feel like you didn't really read what I said and only implied an insult either to me or the OP with a malevolently worded ad populum. The fact that most people use THD instead of a more adequate form if measurement has nothing to do with your disdain and hateful view of this community. It's simply the easier thing to compare. THD is a standard, and Multitone tests are custom. You can't compare the results between different users who use different test procedures. The problem that I'm pointing at however is that you're not using THD for that. You use it to draw ignorant conclusions on working principles of transducers. Your reasoning only applies to multi way devices. A fullrange driver distorts in it's entire bandwidth. This is an obvious fact known to everyone who designs audio and a primary reason why it's worth to build multi way speakers. If a fullrange driver is playing bass, the vocals distort. That's just how it works. HD plots don't display that. Multitone tests do, because unlike HD, they were specifically designed for testing music reproduction.

Hey that's cool. I'll check it out.

I think you may have just demonstrated your lack of understanding of how a driver works. I touched on it in the first post, so I'll begin where I left it. A transducer reproduces sound most accurately near it's resting state. This means that small amplitude vibrations are clean. The further away the diaphragm gets from the center, the less linear it gets and consequently the more the sound distorts. I think so far we are on the same page. So here's where your logic is failing - it's a fullrange driver. At the same time as it plays the lows that push it far from it's comfort zone, it simultaneously plays the highs, that are being reproduced in and out of that comfort zone. The small, high frequency vibrations are subjected to the same modulation of forces as the bass. This causes often audible distortion throughout the range.

The reason why opinions like the above circulate is because many people learn from basic theory and looking at graphs instead of using reasoning and insight. The distortion that you see in reviews is a so called THD or total harmonic distortion. Let's break down this cluster. HD or harmonic distortion is a measurement. It's not a physical property of a driver. It's an oversimplified measurement procedure that is older than sound reproduction itself. It wasn't adapted to your psychoacoustic model, and neither does it describe accurately the troubles of reproducing music. It is simply playing a SINGLE tone and seeing what other tones come out. Total HD is simply a way of presenting this data in even simpler form. No wonder you don't know how a headphone works, you're basing your knowledge on a simplification of an oversimplification. Real distortion test that's representative of sound quality is a multitone intermodulation torture test and a set of compression curves known from Klippel. There are plenty probably other flaws in your concept , but let's just stop and digest this. IMO the OP makes a great point. The basic measurements that we use dont fully describe sound quality. It may be enough for you, but that's just like your opinion, dude.

It does make sense intuitively, doesn't it? I'd love to see it made. Heyser was the pioneer. A real genius. Today maybe Tom Danley is comparable of the guys that I've heard. Not that I've read much.

Heyser basically found what everybody interested in audio wants to know - what is the connection between pleasure objective data. TDS is basically asking a driver to shut up and seeing how it complies. Spoiler alert - it doesn't. Complex diaphragms and motors have resonances that store energy and release it when there is no stimulus. These resonances rob us of silence! No other measurement finds that. There is a lecture on Heyser on YouTube and it captures all you need to know about the guy.

Most famously waterfall plots help us understand the smoothness of tweeter sound. Select people with enough money or DIY patience know that ribbon tweeters sound smooth and domes are harsh despite the fact that they're made of the same material. For a long time there was no graph to capture that, but waterfall makes it clear.