I do feel the smaller orthos have more air. The big ortho headphones - the size of those drivers (in the speaker world) would be considered midrange to low-treble drivers. In other words, they would require a super tweeter.


I need to pull up the SA5000 measurements I have buried somewhere. Would be interesting to see if there are peaks in the 12-14kHz region.

all i found on google was your old waterfall plots of the SA5000. seem slight ringing in the 5k region only and everything else is pretty clean if i'm reading it correctly. i know they have more top-end than Tyll's graphs show for sure from what i hear since i think their main focus on them is an ''airy'' type of presentation. i also feel they have more bass then what tyll's graph shows as well.

I'm not sure "sa5000" and "more bass" go together very well :-)

i know. was just mentioning i feel the sa5000 has bit more bass then what tyll's graph shows in my opinion.

Though I agree that recordings can have grain, when I've heard grain in a pair of headphones I hear it on every recording with information in that range (cymbals mostly)

1. You're not hearing the grain
2. Your Sextetts don't have it (I doubt it, mine are the best of several pairs I had)
3. Your amp is driving them better than mine

3 is clearly the case since it's a speaker amp, but maybe a bit of 1 as well who knows what you're sensitive to and not sensitive to. 

As for recordings, check my post above.  Do you think all of my recordings have grain somehow?  I don't understand the impulse to blame recordings all the time.  All you have to do to eliminate them is listen to a few different recordings and see if it goes away or stays the same. 

well i been listening to the sextetts lately since they just been sitting around so i felt bad. i still hear no grain from them with most stuff i listen to. bright sounding yes,but no grain but did hear an annoyance with one dubstep track i was listening to online that i was checking out and the cymbals had an annoying scratchy crash that was just not from being on the bright-side of things. i still can't conform if it is amping has to do with it since all i use is speaker amps and own zero head amps so i can't say to be honest on that part. or i can just be deaf and not as sensitive to it like you to be honest. probably have better hearing than i do. if you have any audio interfaces with balanced TRS outputs and it has +4dbu/-10db option i would try to run the sextetts off the balanced 1/4'' TRS jacks on the interface instead with a 1/4'' female to dual 1/4'' male jack just to try it if you want. the balanced outputs should output up to 4v  and should be enough for them. or can try it straight from pre-outs on a pre-amp if you have any around. pre-outs are popular way to drive high impedance loads. just a thought.