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The HFM HE 6 have had a lot written about how difficult they may be to drive to their "full potential". There is a pretty glaring visual aspect of
the stock appearance of these phones that for some reason I've never seen a whisper of a mention.The supplied headphone cable really does'nt inspire much confidence that it is capable of doing much more than "just" carrying some trace of a signal to an planar magnetic drivers which we already know are hard to drive. (What a surprise that HFM sells a powerful headphone amplifier that seems to be a highly regarded preference for use with these phones). Would you care to guess how much easier the HE6 are to drive using an aftermarket cable? I was always a bit puzzled by all the talk of how hard they were to drive until I put the stock cable back on. You've heard of "garage band" music well we might be talking about "garage headphone ergonomics" here !
Don't go anywhere this is only the start of how to wring more potential from these headphones!
Due to some of the garage ergonomic features it's pretty easy to tweak these headphones into something pretty exceptional sounding.I have found that I much prefer the AKG K702 velour earpads to the stock earpads. They are slightly bigger than the stock pads but there are any number of ways to attach the new earpads to the cup housing w/ some 3M double sided sticky pads. At this point I have placed 2 circular discs that I've cut from bedroom/bath rug liner foam the same circumference as the earpad openings over the bare planar driver.(this brings the midrange presence up quite a bit;much less distant sounding).The earcup grilles are held in place by a small plastic retainer clip that you can remove with a fingernail(or any thin item. I think the HE6 sounds much better with the drivers on this side with as little damping over them as you feel comfortable with (Mine are completely uncovered on this side)(This really opens up the Soundstage). I'm undecided how much changing the grilles to something more open like metal mesh letter tray or waste basket material makes (I went even lighter & decided to use metal window screening as the grilles)
I have a basically non-existent noise floor (I've tried pretty hard to detect anything but silence between notes & I end up giving up trying)
so I seriously don't know how much these changes will work for others.In my system the HE6 are the better headphone for the music I listen to
(Acoustic & predominantly Orchestral)than the Senn HD800.The stock
HE6 has some easily correctable flaws due to some insufficient "Ergonomics
R&D) I don't think Senn. would have even approved something like the HE designsOh, one more thing. Through chance I've found a fairly inexpensive little tube amp,that(I'd retired sometime ago)that sounds very nice w/ the HE6 a Consonance Cyber 20 w/ some '74 NOS Siemens EL84.(I know of the Schiit amps I did'nt care for them)
Edits: 09/17/14 09/17/14Follow Ups:
Planar magnetic.
"If people don't want to come, nothing will stop them" - Sol Hurok
Oops..... a thousand times,I'll fix it .Thanks,(I was pointing out an ES headamp earlier on another forum)
Edits: 09/17/14
could you post the measured resistance of you cable and of the hifi man cable
Im curious. The hifiman must have some pretty severe resistance going on
Thanks
enjoying music all over again, with Headphones, System: Schiit Uber Bifrost, ampsandsound SE84, HiFi Man HE-500
http://ampsandsound.com/products/amps/se-84/
Well you're out of luck on that request but I do know for a fact that the Headphones volume became anemic when the Double Helix Cable i've been using w/ the HE 6 was replaced w/ the supplied stock cable. I'm sure the DHC cable is light year's ahead in terms of the wire geometry used .(which I find to be pretty impressive just to look at)I'm pretty sure there will probably be pretty significant differences in the comparative measurements of the wires ,but I'm just not equipped to take the measurements
(So they decided to give the Bifrost a "real" output stage. The Bifrost is the DAC that got me interested in NOS DACs)
Edits: 09/17/14
By the way the KMN 4399 which is what the Bifrost uses is not a NOS dac. It is a Delta/Sigma dac with resampling and digital and analog filtering, none of which NOS dacs have. Most NOS dacs use the old R2R ladder chips like Audio Note use or the Terada uses. Does not mean that the Bifrost is not an excellent dac because it is
Alan
Are you sure about that ? I seem to recall the discussion that (I can't think of his name
now) he said he could!nt repeat what Mike Moffat said what the felt about ever using
Upsampling in a DAC so was this all just fictious rhetoric, or do Delta Sigma designs that don't Upsample but are not classified NOS designs exist ?
I believe it may be an AKM 4399 chip that was used, as I had another piece of equipment
that also used an AKM chip a different chip number but I remember remarking to myself
" how about that, this uses an AKM chip also"
These are my recollections , but it's been several years.
Jason Stoddard said this
"One of the reasons we like the AKM4399 (and 4396) is that they use switched-capacitor filters to provide out of band noise performance that is more similar to a multibit DAC. As far as we know, they're unique in this regard. They're still delta-sigma, but they're a rather nice implementation of delta-sigma."
Apparently this is a Delta/Sigma dac that doesn't upsample. I tend to classify nos dacs as those that use the old ladder chips but that is just me. I have Schitt stuff for my headphones and it is very good. Killer at its price points
Alan
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