Ether-C Flow Measurements and Impressions

Nope. But the problem was not the pads according to Dan. He feels the port in the left cup was not tuned correctly, or perhaps fooled around with.

It is not obvious to me how he could tell that because while I did see the port, I did not see the screw he was talking about. Let say it was not in plain sight to me. I can say I did not mock around with them. @GelockS assures me he didn't do anything to it. At the SBAF meet Dan was looking for a small phillips screw driver perhaps to re-adjust them, but could not find one with him and I did not carry one either.

So I honestly don't know what happened. Dan assured me he is anal about QA with these cans.

Anyhow, at yesterday's meet I made more measurements of these:

Sample 1:



Sample 2:



In these cases, the drivers do seem relatively well matched.

 

Dan wanted to run some tone sweeps but his table was busy. Maybe another time we'll check that null.

Dan agrees the null is there, but he feels it's not as wide. Or 300 Hz to 1 kHz is flatter.

I think thing tone balance is right, but not sure there is much that can be done about that null. I've seen this in cans that use ports to tune the bass. Perhaps due to driver. Such can I've experimented that behaved similarly is the Sennheiser HD202. Seal the port and bass goes away magically transforming into and HD201. Let the port free and bass comes back, but the null develops.

 

HD202 vs Ether C:



Similar null develops, though at a different frequency. It could also be related to pad pressure. Proly something a book on headphone drivers might cover. I think Tyll talked about this at IF sometime ago when discussing Skullcandy cans with Dr. Tetsuro Oishi:

http://www.innerfidelity.com/conten...shi-visits-innerfidelit-0#h04OKlurXjQegezT.97

 

Proly something like that. Dunno at this point.

 

I think I did a close mic measurement at the port of my Mackie MR5 MK3s. But not inside.

I can tell you this though, the port size inside an HD202 is tiny.

 

BTW, here is a pic of the port in the HD202 (courtesy of IF)... To lazy to take a pic at this hour.

 

Can do that tonite or later during the week. At the time when I was playing around with the ports, I did not take impedance measurements. Can do that now.

 

I know exactly what went wrong with @GelockS pair. Will post in a bit with photos.

 

At the meet, I spoke with Dan about this. The ports were not tuned the same. These are photos from @GelockS' pair. Anything could have happened: user, manufacturer oversight, shipping (this can happen during shipping!), etc. Pretty easy fix obviously and not a driver issue.

 

I think it's hard for the average user to tune these ports if they get detuned, say during shipping.

Maybe Dan can make some changes in the process to make accidental port detuning more difficult?

 

Now I wonder about the pair I heard at the SoCal mini-meet that sounded super lean and bright. @ultrabike measurements seem like a totally different pair.

 

The Senn guys basically fixed the port size. There is no screw, just a fixed opening. One could potentially remove the soft circle and replace with another one with a different port size. But I think that is not something that can get messed up easily.

It is possible that the planar drivers have more variability and hand tuning is required. But indeed, these screws need to be fixed somehow and a bit more difficult to access for the average costumer IMO.