Bill's HD800 mod thread (final version)

If your talking about the driver small rear metal mesh grill,
I would advise strongly against removal of that small grill.

The strength of that magnet is so strong that it literally pulls the mesh screen firmly in place.
It can yank a metal screw towards it from literally a few inches away!

Yes, there is a rear wave type of reflection from this grill which is barely noticable,
And depending on listener, can cause ear fatigue in the very high treble range.

This should be looked into with measurements, but..

Instead of grill removal, (which exposed rear of driver),
A simple addition of smaller circle shaped piece of very thin shelf liner inside, will solve the problem just as well...

 

Yes , those are the screens I removed sometime ago. I haven't had any problems ,but I'm listening in a room where I have an Ionic Air Cleaner running constantly & I don't put the headphones down anywhere but my hp stand which I make sure never has an small metal objects near it ever.

I suppose If I place non resonant / damping material between the screens & the back of the rings it may have worked at stopping the resonance the screen coupling to rings is generating as it was the constant vibration of the driver's energy that is the source of what bothered me regardless of what is playing at whatever volume. I don't listen to anything but Acoustic music, when you add resonance created from energy from the headphone you've changed the transient response time of the start & decay time of the played notes.

It was an oversight of mine to come up with an "Un- Elegant" way to change the headphone, I was immediately so floored with the major change in sound characteristics I ended up playing a huge proportion of my music library , & I lost sight of doing anything further then leaving the headphones "screenless". "

Murphy" would have hated me,but I think he probably lived with a lot of mediocre things; Until they ended up breaking.

 

Having resonance is news to me.
I find that hard to believe.
What I tested for, was reflective properties.
I quickly placed and took off the grill to hear a very slight dereference which was a rough addition to the treble region.
This I accounted for as the reflection of the grill.
I world never thought that a grill that tiny would have any vibration problem.
I not dismiss or disagree with your explanations , but it sounds like what the SAA site says.
Personally I think the SAA MOD site explanations about the hd800 vibration problems are absolutely total BS .

 

I d

 

I will not discount your findings.
I would test by applying some dynamat around the circumference to test.
Edit:
Athough that would be messy, and I just painted my grills ,
So I probably won't and leave the assumptions alone,
as I am very satisfied with the layer of shelf liner that solves the issue for me, regardless what the source of problems are.

 

Hmmm.... I'm reminded of Gerswln lyrics at the moment "Potato...Potahto, let's call
the whole thing off"

It appears that my subjective listening perspectives may be beyond the scope of my abilities to explain why certain things made more of a difference for myself. I'm not quite sure I'm ready to call anyone's claims total BS... ever. (They may in fact be just that, but anything we do to these headphones comes down to each individual's perspective)

My perspective at the moment is "I'm happy with how "my" HD800 no longer give me the sound artifacts that drew my attention away from any small dynamic element of scoring of various Composer's Orchestral writting" . I put a good amount of effort into putting together a musical playback system that enhances the sound of my listening preferences. The HD800 wanted to overstep it boundaries in just being a component part of a system, it doesn't do that currently. Listen to all genres of Music ? "Bah", I'd just as soon listen to the noise of highway traffic.

(I realize this was a pretty crappy positing in terms of technical explanations,but I might be done with those as outlined in my first paragraph & I decided to just go with the flow; No screens works very well...for me....for the music I listen to (Acoustical), I honestly don't know (or care) how it works for other music)

 

Gentlemen, this is why some of us have measurement systems.

Sometimes it's good to have a sanity check of some sort.

For instance, this is from the same pair of HE-5 that I'm working on recently:



And after some reflection damping: (covering surfaces in microfiber cloth or felt or open-cell foam)



Notice the red region has reduced drastically.

I initially and erroneously thought that the red region in spectrogram was just depicting an ortho wall (because the ortho wall is there in CSD), but... no, it also had mild ringing around there. Killing that region made the headphone 1000% more awesome.

Unfortunately, I don't have an HD800 on hand right now to test this, but... yeah, this is why I'm starting to prefer Spectrograms over CSDs as a visualization tool. They both show the same thing, but it's easier to pick out what needs to be reduced/worked on with Spectrogram as opposed to just eliminating razors in CSDs.

 

Wow nice measurement info!

Also, you got a hold of an HE5 (!)

I was lucky to find a Code-X but was in sad need of repair.
I just fixed, but if I keep them,
I intend/hope to send to LFF if he still has time.

So far I think they are great.
Yet I only have Audeze pads for them.
I don't have any other pads...

Yet the HD800 alwasy tend to be the reference to beat.

 

Yeah... Luis is still busy with my Code-X. Haha (yeah, I have an HE-5 and a Code-X on order, so... 2 HE-5s in total)

I'll ask and see if he has time later on to look at repairing your pair. What's wrong with it, by the way?

And yeah... I'm tempted to jump back in to the HD800 at some point. But maybe with the HD800S instead?

 

I can agree with your post.
Although it truley is hard to describe subtleties that the measurements might show,
Nevertheless it is there and the fact that you can enjoy more is proof that we can hear the difference no matter how small or vague.
It accumulates to a large difference over time as we listen to music.
Especially when your mind is now aware of it.

 

Bill_P I will PM you about Code-X,
Thanks for your concern

 

@Bill-P

My (Stock) Sennheiser HD800 (sn. 227xx) has the newer type of earpads and measures very similar to yours.

Klasse : Pink Traces
Bill-P: Red Trace

 

Ok...., This may be off track a bit, but does anyone know why Marv (at least I thought it was Marv) thought it was a mistake to remove the other "screens"(I think they're actually "baffles") from the ear baskets ?

Was this because the.drivers need these baffles for lower frequency re-enforcement ? There is still a very slight touch of (a whisper) fowardness that robs certain acoustical instruments (such as violins) the same amount of spatial exactitude that brass or wind sections seem to have.

I'm really just nitpicking here, as what I'm hearing from my HD800 now is probably as "un-mechanical" sounding as this headphone will allow me to go . (I may be talking "Apples" to everyone else's "Oranges", but I appreciate other's insights all the same)

 

1-Yes. DO NOT REMOVE the screens. You will lose all of the low frequency information starting at 2kHz(!).
2-Yep, that's the way it is. It is still an HD800 after all. Which liner are you using in the cups? Also, could you please recap which mods you are using now?

 

Yeah, I thought that might have been the case !

Removing the (actual) screens resulted in significantly increasing the amount of acoustically generated bass, removing the
"Baffles" would probably cancel out this increase & continue to decrease these frequencies even further.

I'm using the shelf liner that has 1/8" squares spacing on the "baffles" surfaces, felt covered Creatology foamboard covering where the "metal ring" used to be & over the trapezoidal areas of the ear baskets & I've removed the black nylon type material covering the drivers. For myself though the thing that seemed to make the most positive effect was removing the rings & screens (or as I like to call them "The Sennheiser Reverb Circuit") I've also hardwired a Black Drragon headphone cable , I'd had on a Beyer hp, straight to the driver's terminals.

I haven't done anything to the cans for about a year now, so I might be done.Thanks for confirming what I thought was the reason for not removing these parts ! (I had to ask ; as it seems the most positive changes for myself have been when I've removed "design features" that work against getting the best response from my music preferences as my playback system is able to present the sound.)

 

out of curiosity, has anyone heard both bill's modded hd800 and the SD resonator or SD+Absorber modded 800? Curious how the two mods compare subjectively and objectively!

 

and moreover, looking at Klasse's post above, it looks like newer versions of the 800, with revised earpads, seem to measure similarly, not sure about the subjective impact and whether it mirrors the measurements above.

 

When did Sennheiser change the earpads?

As far as I know
sn. 08xxx models have thin earpads

While
sn. 16xxx / sn. 22xxx / sn. 30xxx all have thick earpads

Maybe someone with a sn. between 09xxx and 15xxx can chime in.
It's not necessary to remove the earpads in order to measure them.

Thanks!

 

Funny you should ask. I have 13437 and 32591 in da house. They do compress as they age but 13437 is definitely thinner than the new one.

 

Great!

Bill posted the two models here:

Do you think your sn. 13xxx has the same pads as CEE TEE's sn. 08xxx?