CHANGSTAR: Audiophile Headphone Reviews and Early 90s Style BBS
Main Deck => Discussion for Registered Members Only => Topic started by: Tari on October 22, 2012, 06:36:51 PM
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Finally managed to find the time to take some comparative shots:
Slightly older model (going by SN):
(http://i.imgur.com/MAt3Gh.jpg)
Slightly newer model:
(http://i.imgur.com/dNX3Ih.jpg)
The difference is even more obvious to the naked eye than the pictures make it out to be. It was also fairly obvious when listening right off the bat, which is why I came to inspect them at all - the one with thicker (and more tightly woven) grill cloth sounded less transparent (slight veil I guess) than the one with the thinner cloth.
Other shots: [size=78%]http://imgur.com/a/9c482 (http://imgur.com/a/9c482)[/size]
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Thanks, those pictures are fine :)
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The normal bias SR-Lambda is my personal favorite of the Lambdas I've heard (which are roughly in order: SR-407, SR-202, SR-407LE, SR-507, Nova Signature, Normal Bias, and Signature). The Nova Signature is a close second, followed by the SR-507. The Signature (non-Nova) was too bright to my ears, though it could have been the setup I heard it on at the time.
Hehe. I guess I just need an amp then if I'm already that close to the top. Or at least my top. The 009 is out of my league Probably the O2 as well, though I'm not sure if I'd like it's FR as much.
Now I 'just' need to find a good design that doesn't use bins full of rare transistors or double as a space heater...
:wheel:
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@ Tari:
Thanks for the pictures of the two. My SR-007 is definitely closer to the top picture with the thinner material. Hmm...
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I'm not sure what to attribute it to - maybe original stax pads vs some facsimile sold by joynet? I haven't even tried taking off the pads yet.
Justin has posted PDF's for the new Stax models:
http://www.headamp.com/newstax1.pdf
http://www.headamp.com/newstax2.pdf
Looks like the new portable will have 4 hours of effective battery life. I wonder if an adapter could be made to try to take 007's on the go (cue Googleli here).
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Yes. I've played with O2 pads on orthos a lot, and that dust cloth has a significant impact on SQ. I didn't actually think it would, and so wasn't paying attention to it. But I noticed it when a damping scheme was ruined after I added the dust cloth back to a scheme I had been working on without it. It was suddenly veiled and dull sounding. I thought I must have messed up and it must be the midnight rose colored glasses, but on a whim, I removed the cloth, and it sounded good again. That stock cloth doesn't really change the FR, it just dulls down the sound. I don't imagine it could sound harsh without it. But you'd have to experiment.
If it sounds better without, you could remove it altogether from your O2 and replace it with legging material. There is a plastic O ring that holds this cloth, and that O ring comes right out of the earpad (it's not attached), so you could easily cut out the stock cloth, and then glue leggins onto this O ring and put it back into the pad. You'd have to remove the pads from the phones to do this. Here's the best way to do that in case anyone wants to. This is how I rescreened my Sextett.
cut out stock cloth
find a flat board, like a cutting board that you're ok putting some holes into
stretch a peice of legging material big enough to fit O ring out, and use tacks to hold it stretched evenly (not stretched too tight, just a bit so it's even and flat)
then glue the O ring onto this with whatever glue would be best. Maybe super glue. use quick drying glue and make sure you don't glue the ring onto the board below. Use a spatula or something, running underneath periodically to make sure it's separate.
At your own risk of course.
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RD, do you have any stax pads at home you could try this with? I'd pay you for them to try it out - I just don't want to ruin my essentially NOS pads if I end up selling the headphones.
I'm not surprised it makes a difference, I thought it changed the Audeze sound not insignificantly. I think Kabeer has similar theories.
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I don't have time, but I do have some pads, and if someone else wants to do it, I could send them the O ring that holds the speaker cloth.
It's kind of a win win situation though if you first try just taking out teh cloth all together and see how it sounds. This is totally reversible, and won't damage anything. The O ring with the cloth is just held in the folds of the earpads. Might not want to leave it unprotected for a long time, but you could hear the difference that way.
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I'll try that when I get home. I assume naked sounds better (based on how the thinner weave sounded better) but dust seems like an issue, no?
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hmmm yeah I have read about stats being sensitive to dust so maybe there's a reason for a thick fabric there. I don't know about that one. But trying it temporarily won't hurt, dust is a problem when they're sitting around, not on your head.
Seems like leggings would offer just as much dust protection but I don't really know.
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O2 has a dust cover though. The thicker fabric is probably to prevent hair from sticking through and poke holes in said dust cover.
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There's a dust cover in addition to the fabric speaker cloth?
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Yes. It is an wrinkled plastic sheet on top of the stators. According to this (http://www.head-fi.org/t/223263/the-stax-thread-new/19110#post_8601756) post, Japanese men slowly finger rubs it to introduce wrinkles into the sheet. This makes the material acoustically transparent. It takes 30 hours of manual rubbing to achieve that effect.
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Very interesting info RD... especially if FR changes so much. I need to check my BL to see what sort of dust cover it has in the pads. Sorry if this derailed your thread MF, maybe it needs its own thread?
Would any SR-007A or MK2 users care to comment on what sort of dust cover is on the black MK2 pads? I was going to switch to MK2 pads when my BL mk1 pads wore out, but I have at least another 2-3 years left on them. And those pads are freakin' expensive.
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I have the thicker/dense one on my mk2.5s.
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No, from memory it does not change the FR. It just dulls it down significantly, but you'll have to try it and see.
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Must be dust.. time to take an air blower to those drivers ! :)p8
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What must be dust? I'm talking about listening to a Fostex T20v1 with and without the O2 dust cover and hearing significant differences. I did'nt expect it to make a difference and I was about to tear open the phones again and check my damping but realized the one thing that changed was adding the dust cover...
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I have the thicker/dense one on my mk2.5s.
Sweet, thanks :)p1
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Well, I took off the grill cloth on both pads, ( it was a PITA getting them back on - first time changin the pads out on MK1's, really weird system) - it feels even cleaner and more transparent, but I don't know what to chalk up to bias in this case. My KGSSHV only has one jack so no direct AB is possible. I'd really like to know if this is something that damages the headphones for some reason, as I'm loving the sound right now.
Pictures on the morrow.
Test tracks if anyone cares: Denny Zeitlin - I-thou, Jeanne Lee/Mal Waldron - You Go to My Head, The Meters- Hey Pock a Way
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I had a bit of Trypophobia with the original image...
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Had to look that one up.
You shouldn't read arguments on the internet then.
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My early mk1 also have this very transparent screen definitely the mk2.5 has denser woven cloth.
As for the use of it, it would do a pretty poor job as dust cover and every driver has a wrinkled impervious membrane on both stators that act as dust covers. Not sure about the 30 hours hand rubbing, but indeed you'll get nasty resonances with the diaphragm unless you wrinkle it / mount with little to no tension.
For the screen, it is probably partially to block debris (skin, hairs) but absolutely it also acts like an acoustic filter just like every over drivers. You should expect a roll off from the mids up due to both the barrier performance (e.g. Direct driver radiation into the earcup) as well as absorption performance (e.g. Reflected waves bouncing of the skin back to the driver).
The thicker and /or denser the screen, the stronger the effect and lower te frequency from which it will have influence. In that sense, the screen should be pretty much acoustically transparent up to lower mids, if only some additional driver damping in the case of light membranes (estat, and I guess orthos to a lesser extent?)
As it stands, I am totally digging my mk1 with the "old" style pads. I have the sr009 when I want more treble :).
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Had to look that one up.
You shouldn't read arguments on the internet then.
:( Stax is creepy.
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Well, I took off the grill cloth on both pads, ( it was a PITA getting them back on - first time changin the pads out on MK1's, really weird system) - it feels even cleaner and more transparent, but I don't know what to chalk up to bias in this case. My KGSSHV only has one jack so no direct AB is possible. I'd really like to know if this is something that damages the headphones for some reason, as I'm loving the sound right now.
Pictures on the morrow.
Test tracks if anyone cares: Denny Zeitlin - I-thou, Jeanne Lee/Mal Waldron - You Go to My Head, The Meters- Hey Pock a Way
Like ujamer says there is a real dust cover around the stators (things like HE60 do not have one), along with PCB stators it is one of the things that makes the O2 drivers so durable. This speaker cloth is probably for keeping out larger debris.
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My early mk1 also have this very transparent screen definitely the mk2.5 has denser woven cloth.
As for the use of it, it would do a pretty poor job as dust cover and every driver has a wrinkled impervious membrane on both stators that act as dust covers. Not sure about the 30 hours hand rubbing, but indeed you'll get nasty resonances with the diaphragm unless you wrinkle it / mount with little to no tension.
For the screen, it is probably partially to block debris (skin, hairs) but absolutely it also acts like an acoustic filter just like every over drivers. You should expect a roll off from the mids up due to both the barrier performance (e.g. Direct driver radiation into the earcup) as well as absorption performance (e.g. Reflected waves bouncing of the skin back to the driver).
The thicker and /or denser the screen, the stronger the effect and lower te frequency from which it will have influence. In that sense, the screen should be pretty much acoustically transparent up to lower mids, if only some additional driver damping in the case of light membranes (estat, and I guess orthos to a lesser extent?)
As it stands, I am totally digging my mk1 with the "old" style pads. I have the sr009 when I want more treble :) .
That's interesting, so essentially the clearer/more transparent sound I'm hearing (which at the same time I was saying was less dark) was just that - a headphone with less roll off, and thus perceived clarity due to more "sparkling" highs. It would be interesting to measure the difference to see how negligible it is.
I hang around magicians a lot, so I have to worry about quarters falling out of my ears at inopportune times - perhaps its worth keeping the cloth on for that.
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It would be interesting to measure the difference to see how negligible it is.
I would love to see something like this. I remember a discussion in the past where people were throwing the dreaded placebo(expectation bias?) term back and forth about cloth over drivers. It would be nice to see that put to rest.
Also, it would save my clumsy self from ruining my SR-007BL trying to figure it out. It has replacement pads with the newer tightly woven cloth over the drivers.
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I'm not sure about the theory that material in front of the driver only changes FR and that is what accounts for the sound difference. I think it does change FR, but you also loose subtle details in the filtering process, though this is just my experience from experimenting.
I remember a discussion in the past where people were throwing the dreaded placebo(expectation bias?) term back and forth about cloth over drivers.
That is idiotic. Of course it does something. Whether it is substantial enough to make a difference depends on the material and then of course the user. And whether the difference is good or bad depends on the driver and the rest of the phone as well. I prefer the HD650 with foam in.
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Coverings do tend to suppress the region around 8kHz-15kHz.
Damping around 'stats tends to magically flatten peaks and irregularities in FR - rather amazing in this regard. (Damping with orthos tends push bass down and treble up, e.g. LCD3 Toiletpants mods.) In this case, I don't think there's enough material for damping the STAX diaphragm. The effect is more likely some suppression of mid/high treble and absorption / masking of plankton / information.
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Well, I took off the grill cloth on both pads, ( it was a PITA getting them back on - first time changin the pads out on MK1's, really weird system)
I still have periodic PTSD flashbacks of my first attempt changing the SR-007's pads. LOL. Definitely one of the most time-consuming systems employed on a headphone, but I appreciate the utility once they're fixed on there.
I also infinitely prefer it to adhesive backing (as in the Lambdas or the Sony R10...).
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One of the things I'd (begrudgingly) grant the Abyss is their magnetic system for snapping on and off the pads. If it's anything like, say, how my MBP's charger locks in/out then it's a very cool system indeed.
The only problem with adhesive is it's hard to take pads on/off without tearing some of the backing, especially if they've been on for years. (Its also terrible if you put one pad on at a different angle than the other, try to undo it, end up screwing up both, scratch your head thinking how to fix it, realize you had glue on your hands that's now in your hair, try to get it out with said gluey hands only compounding the issue, then break down realizing you ruined your pads and won't be able to give the hair you've been growing for 4 months to locks of love.)
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The only problem with adhesive is it's hard to take pads on/off without tearing some of the backing, especially if they've been on for years.
Yeah, this was especially problematic with the R10. The same pads had been on for most of its life, and so the adhesive oozed everywhere and fused to the foam ring around the drivers. Removing them was a nightmare; they crumbled to bits along with bits of the foam, and it was just a mess.
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Took some pictures without the cloth. The headphones look so naked without it. Still think it sounds really good.
(http://i.imgur.com/SZnlqh.jpg)
(http://i.imgur.com/zIbrQh.jpg)
(http://i.imgur.com/aqqj8h.jpg)
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Put some protection back in! (http://pub.head-case.org//public/style_emoticons/default/Throw.gif)
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IDK... my room is so dusty, and my hair is so uncooperative, that I'd be scared of shit getting into there. I know it's got dust covers, but....
Too many bad experiences with stats lol.
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Took some pictures without the cloth. The headphones look so naked without it. Still think it sounds really good.
(http://i.imgur.com/aqqj8h.jpg)
Is this piece cut out, or does it "pop out" of the earpads?
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It pops out. I must not be communicating well... It's just held in by folds of the pad
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It's held in by a fold in the pads- pops right out, and reversible- you can just pop it right back in.
However, in order to fool around with material for the cloth I'd have to either find identical o-rings, or cut out the grill cloth on these o-rings and replace it with something else, which is obviously irreversible.
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Interesting. If I knew how to sew I would try to replicate that with leather O ring and pantyhose grill. (what the Sennheiser modders used to do with HD650). If it's the same as stitching up skin it couldn't be that bad, but I still see it being tricky with how thin the pantyhose is.
edit: and the pad changing how to for anyone that hasn't seen it:
(http://i119.photobucket.com/albums/o130/j-pak/staxpads.jpg)
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You don't have to find identical o-rings. Just buy some thin plastic sheets from home depot. Cut the sheets into rings, then tape/glue the new screen in place.
However, in order to fool around with material for the cloth I'd have to either find identical o-rings, or cut out the grill cloth on these o-rings and replace it with something else, which is obviously irreversible.
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Could do that is well. A little more labor intensive, but should work fine. I guess the undercurrent is that I'm lazy with these types of things.
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So, MF, I don't remember where we discussed this, might have been the soap box. About the Omega 2 mk1 brown color pads: they're no longer manufactured but Stax keeps a bit of stock... At least in Japan, people can be covered through official retailers or direct communication with Stax. So, if you wanted to buy a pair, I could probably arrange for you, lemme know...
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I replaced the denser dust cover on my MK1 BL pads with legging material. There is quite a significant change in sound, for the better. I wish I could remember if my older 007 MK1s had the thinner or denser material on the pads, I am guessing they were all later production models with the thicker fabric since they all sounded the same.
Played some Music Matters vinyl (Out to Lunch 45 rpm) and the recent Soft Parade 45 rpm remaster. The better the recording the more open the O2s sound with the thinner membrane. Bass performance didn't change and was still tight and articulate. The pads fit and rotate fine, but I think I might still see about making some leather O-rings with the legging material stitched in the inside. Either way I will be replacing the current leggings with black ones since they are a very light brown and I hate when stuff mismatches.
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Nice! Are you hearing an FR change, or just an increase in detail and transparency?
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Cool, when my new black pads come in I'll try it. It seems like such a simple yet pretty effective mod... and you don't even have to send out to Iceland to get it done.
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Nice! Are you hearing an FR change, or just an increase in detail and transparency?
Hard to say if there is an increase in detail or FR. I will need to do more listening, I have some Albert Ayler, Sun Ra and Yosuke Yamashita cued up for this evening, I will report back. It's been ages since I've used reference tracks, I usually just listen to what I'm in the mood for since I am not really a modder.
An increase in transparency- for sure. Dolphy's alto sounds more direct and dimensional. Morrison's vocal is more forward as well and the first track "Tell All The People" sounds even more bombastic.
Cool, when my new black pads come in I'll try it. It seems like such a simple yet pretty effective mod... and you don't even have to send out to Iceland to get it done.
Mind saying where you got these from? I have only found Ebay as source. Craig at Kuboten has not been very communicative recently :-[
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Also eBay here. I've seen yahoo japan as well but frankly that's too much of a mess to deal with.
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Spent more time listening to the thinner inner liner, and there might be a little increase in the upper mids. With a bit longer term listening I've not noticed any draw backs to the thinner material sound wise. Though some recordings where I did notice it was unpleasant was on the Dylan mono box vinyl set- his harmonica is slightly too piercing at higher volumes. With the old thicker liner I could listen to them at the same volume.
I think I'll be keeping them in there :)p3
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hmmm if harmonica is more peircing that would indicate an increase in upper mids. Could be a good thing though since the upper mids are recessed on most 02's right?
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I recently received my first pair of 007's (70xxx), the original pads were greasy and stunk, I immediately replaced them with new mk2 pads not thinking anything of it.
After stumbling across this post I noticed that the original pads did have the thinner dust cover in them, happy I saved them. I changed them out last night and kept the mk2 pad in, amazed at the differences . Same experience as omegakitty on certain recordings, is this why they changed them out? Anyhow, they are in for now and I am enjoying them.