The vintage Ortho thread

Some impressions on @gurubhai's modded YH-100:

Bottom line: I think this is the cleanest planar I have ever heard.

I got this about 10 days ago, having heard it late last year and not being impressed with it. It sounded way too forward for me with not enough lower end heft. Fast forward to late June/early July when he very graciously sent it to me again on request. I first used the Cavalli Liquid Carbon and stopped listening after about a minute. It sounded lifeless. I was advised to use an OTL amp so I used the Project Ember. DAC was the Bifrost MB. The YH-100 was a different animal altogether. I was immediately struck with the lower end extension and clear mids with a top that was fairly extended with no sibilance. I switched to the Yggdrasil + ZDS. The synergy with the ZDS was fantastic. I could hear the low end very palpably without having the boom of the Fostex Th X00 (which can get very tiring after a while). The mids were clear and the I found very little to almost no bleed into the mids from the lower end. Treble continued to be really clean with no sibilance. In general, this is a little more of a forward headphone compared to the Paradox Slants which is my go-to planar headphone.

I have no idea what mods @gurubhai has done so those questions are best directed to him. Having owned a bunch of Audez'e (and sold almost all of 'em) and HFM planars, chalk this one up for the vintage orthos.

 

YH-100 doesnt have too much space for modding. But would like to hear from gurubhai what magic he worked on those. Also was it with stock pads?

 

The thing with Yamahas is , never change the pads. Stock gets you the best potential possible.

@Kothganesh - Do you think if it was only the midrange that was forward or was it all of it ?
I too think it was a bit too forward, but the frequency balance was really nice and clean.
If YH100 impressed you, wait for his HP1 which is like at a much higher league. Imaging and dynamics king i'd say.

 

Abhishek, it was really all of it.

 

Thanks for your impressions Ganesh, glad you liked them.

@MuZo2 : Mods involve the yellow fiberglass as the main damping layer followed by some felt and foam applied as a pressing layer.

 

About YH100 - This was Yamaha's flagship once they discontinued the YH1000 somewhere around early 80s. It has a 55 mm driver similar to Yamaha HP-1 but with much stronger magnets.
Sound wise, stock yh100, in my personal opinion, is among the worst headphones I have ever tried. It sounds very dull and closed in with loose, boomy bass and the treble is almost non existent.
Thankfully it responds quite well to mods although working with YH100 is a real pain. Like Muzo said, there is little space to work with here and since yh100 needs much more damping than a usual Ortho, the lack of space is specially troublesome here. Also, yh100 cups tend to rotate 360 degrees and that coupled with weird vent location, it becomes quite difficult to open and close.
The good news is that once its done, it is among the cleanest sounding headphones you will ever hear, probably evident from the superb distortion measurements. The bass is fantastic with great extension,resolution and dynamics. The midrange is excellent with superb low level detail and unlike most modern headphones, there is no dip in upper mids which may be the reason that Ganesh finds them forward. Its excellent for the guitar and violins though because of that and I personally love that.
Another reason may be that this is also a very visceral sounding headphone with a very palpable presence unlike most other planars.
All in all, I probably won't recommend this to a budding orthohead who'd probably be better served with a fostex t10, t20 or even a Yamaha hp-1 but for an experienced modder this does present an opportunity for a endgame headphone.

 

Gotcha...I guess I am not used to that clarity in the midrange with the other planars that I owned/own.

 

Gurubhai if you get hold of PMB 50mm drivers go for it, while Yamaha have smooth syrupy flavor. PMB are airy and extend on both sides. PMB have also one of best bass quality and quantity of center pin vintage orthos.

 

@gurubhai Did you mod the YH100 even further after I heard it last time ?

 

PMB are all 55mm drivers, no? The only 50mm driver ortho I remember is of YH-1000.
I did own the PMB 80 (two of them actually though one of them had faulty drivers). I liked them, they are a bit higher tuned than the Yamaha drivers so they don't require as much damping as the Yammies to sound good but once the Yamaha orthos were fully modified, my experience was that they bettered the PMBs both in terms of resolution and FR extension.
There are different PMB driver variants though so its quite possible that you have been more lucky than I to receive a more capable PMB driver.

I did make some improvements.
The last time you heard they had a little peak in 11-12k region, most people would have probably liked that but I am particularly sensitive to treble peaks. Also the decay was a bit shorter than natural which affected the timber and it appeared a bit strained at the frequency extremes( reduced air and sub bass) and so wasn't picking the ambient information as well as I would have liked.
Basically all signs of slightly excessive damping so I backed off and reduced the damping little bit which provided substantial improvement in terms of all of the above. Basically, I would say that they were quite close to the finished article this time and sounded really nice.

 

Rocking a Sansui SS-100 over here, which is basically a T50 with the slotted disc magnets from the T30.



These are one of the cleanest headphones I've ever used and after mods they are also the most neutral by far.

Here's a quick set of plots:











One of the best set of measurement's I've ever gotten. FR is almost perfectly flat, with just a slight (1-2dB) bump at 1-2kHz and a 10dB dip at 4kHz (which is an artifact according to CSD). FR gently slants after 1kHz down to -5dB @ 20kHz. Insanely smooth and extended at both ends.

Spectro is very clean, with some excess energy around 2.5kHz. Distortion shows some wonky behavior here too, climbing to about 1%. They do sound slightly harsh here but not intolerably so. The impulse response... Jesus Christ. One of the cleanest I've ever seen from anything. Compare to the HD800's:



It's really insane how good these are. If the unpleasant coloration in the upper mids wasn't there, they'd pretty much be perfect. 42 years. This headphone was released 42 years ago. I don't know whether to be impressed, or horrified.

BTW: These are nothing like modern planarmagnetics. Not even a modded HE-6 can stand up to these as far as accuracy is concerned. Bass is better on the HFMs though.

BTW #2: I noticed a lot of people talking about those yellow fiberglass damping discs earlier and my mods for the Sansui actually does not make use of these so I have a few spares lying around -- shoot me a PM if you want a pair and I can hook you up for cheap.

 

Yeah they can sound slightly lean, not gonna deny that, but with how small of a coloration the 1-2kHz bump is I find it very hard to notice after the first 2 or 3 songs.

I can also comfortably listen to stock HD800, Sony DR-Z7, and at least tolerate stock HD700 for a while. So take that as you will.

 

Ya, looking at the measurements it does seem that the T10 is more linear and smoother in FR. It is quite possible though that there are some advantages of that big driver/ tak's modding skills that these set if measurements are overlooking . I have to say though that it does seem quite far-fetched esp. after looking at that distortion.

 

One thing I found nothing has been able to do as well as these is the treble. Everything past 5kHz, including the last octave (10-20kHz) is very flat and smooth with almost no rolloff.

 

@gurubhai, if you have the time you should give a brief write up on some basic mods that one can do to orthos like the HP1. Steps that will get it to a significant portion of its true potential.

 

Same headphone, but now different in both pads and damping from when I sent it to Tyll. Here's the configuration Tyll recieved, measured on my rig. I only have one plot, because this configuration was quite quickly scrapped after getting them back. I THINK this is the left channel:









I actually wasn't happy with them in this configuration, but at that point in time everything I liked had measured as bass-light ont Tyll's rig so I deliberately tuned them loosely. Once I got my measurement rig I realized Tyll's sealing methodology was flawed and that I should've trusted my ears in the first place.

Compare to Tyll's PDF and they look pretty similar:

http://www.innerfidelity.com/images/SansuiSS100MeasurementC.pdf

 

Also, RE distortion measurements, I measure at 95dB, while most people measure at 90. I'll do another set of measurements on the Sansui at 90dB later tonight when it's real good and quiet in the house and see if it tells a different story. The larger Fostex planars only have a max input of 250mW so its very possible that 95 is pushing the limits of what the transducer was designed to output. It's certainly not a normal listening level.

 

Here's a quick plot of the SS-100 @ 90dB as promised. I fucked around with the seal on the measurement rig a bit and got some better results than before so I went ahead and took down several plots for it:











I think doing 95dB as my standard may have been a less-than-good idea in the first place... #oops

Distortion seems to have calmed down a lot. Doesn't quite breach the 1% barrier anymore except at the very lowest (<20Hz) bass. The 1-2kHz bump and midrange bowing has mostly subsided as well; these seem to vary a bit based on their positioning as I managed both better, and worse midrange shape than the reference plot while doing this.