I see, you bought this one from Chrono :D

Yeah now I see your point bro, I will email them.

/r/techsupportgore dayum

Once you take them apart, you'll feel better. I was worried too, but man these things come apart and go back together so easily,

Consider the Lehmann Linear. I think it is seriously underrated and I don't know anyone else who uses one.

I have one and use it with my iDSD Pro as a DAC

It drives my Arya better than anything else I've tried, and it is quite astonishing with the Thieaudio Ghost

Edit: Apologies, I just noticed it is way above your budget, but I would see if you can audition one, and save up or see if you can get one second hand. I bought the Linear over the Rupert Neve as that was only £150 cheaper

[deleted]

[deleted]

It's an unfortunate because I would like to purchase the microphone version to use in Discord calls, but thank you so much for the elaborated answer!

To be on the safe side, never disconnect!

I mean technically this was my second pair. The new connectors do feel tighter but hey old ones are like a decade old it seems. Might try to make something modular because I plan to swap cables.

I can never keep them from getting tangled up. I have straight cables in lengths from 3-25ft, so I just swap them as needed.

I like coiled cables so I might get a coiled aux cable for it.

I did the same thing to my pair of Sony MDR-7506s. So much more convenient than the stock coiled cable.

Agree with this, though for me it's gaming on the 6xx vs the Sundara. The Sundara have a wider soundstage but it's very thin and vertical, like two walls of sound to either side of your head. They're fine for regular games, but for fps I also cannot tell where anything is lol. I find the 6xx much better for gaming, and the 660s2 even better.

Those connectors can be crazy tight if they are new, i remember the horror of trying to remove cable first time with my HD800.

Bad design. Yeah, some who end up in the situation as shown in OP's image separated the connector housing from the headphone by attempting to yank it out with too much force. The lemo-type connector used for the HD800 series has a locking mechanism when inserted into its housing.

To release, one needs to twist the connector back and forth while gently pulling it out. One finds that doing so doesn't require that much force. I much prefer the Focal Utopia's more sensible approach, which requires pulling down on the top of the connector to cause this top to slide down slightly and release the connector from its housing, so one can release the connector and pull the headphone cable out from the earcup all in one motion.

But yeah, this aspect of HD800 series design is pretty awful, especially for the uninitiated.

Right, but it doesn't matter whether it's the encoder or the parameters, the point is the result is different.

If you increase the parameters on SBC (SBC XQ) it can sound great too, but that doesn't help you particularly if the bitpool is artificially limited to a low bitrate as is done on Samsung buds (bitpool 37 rather than 53) and I believe, Windows.

That you could theoretically get a different result if the parameters were different, doesn't get you the different result, you get the result with the parameters chosen by the developers of the stuff you are using.

The Apple encoder is I believe different from the Fraunhofer one, and is supposedly, better. So there it's not just the parameters. But even if it was just the parameters, the average user isn't rooted and can't change the parameters. So it doesn't matter whether it's the "encoder" or the "parameters".

Personally- I think AAC sounds fine on Android, so I'm with your there.

mine was fine until the rubber flaked away near the left port. cut it open because it was basicly worthless anyway. its a ton of thicker (looked silver by weight and color, but probably nickel/chrom plated copper?) wires around some cotton and then 2 single really tiny silver wires for signal. build quallity is not the best i might say. considering that those cables where 300 bucks solo at launch when most random sub 100 solutions have about the same quality... yikes

I am very well aware of this article from sound guys.

BTW, I was talking about encoders while you are talking about difference in configuration. The Android encoder was developed by Fraunhofer Institute, the very people who invented MP3 & AAC, but the manufacturer can set the bandwidth of the encoder. If the phone is rooted, we could change the bandwidth.

Anyways, the cutoff doesn't matter much. There is very little energy in music beyond 13kHz except for cymbal crashes.

Yea I’ve seen lots of people say it splits at the Y but I’ve got parts for custom cables coming today and I might go by Redco and buy some wire. Fixing these headphones was just a trial run on making cables I guess lol

Yes they are.

I like HD650 for gaming as well, but couldn't game with HE4XX, I had no idea where anything was with those.

If you are refuting something your own experience didn't hold true, you're literally diregarding yourself and what you heard yourself. If you, as an average user will hear the difference, then why would you assume other average users wouldn't.

I test things with a sample of around 35 people before making a "most people" argument, and the rate of success of a test must be over 70% , and usually 80%. For Mp3 vs flac, the rate with which they could tell the differences and which was superior was 75% with metal, 50% with classical (no bias, they couldn't really do it), and around 65% with pop, the Mp3 compresion algorithm clearly has a bias towards making changes that are not audible with classical but can show in highly dynamically compressed music such as rock or pop. The test we did was with Mp3 320CBR vs flac, and it was done using both speakers and headphones, both of which setups were midrange to get what a true average user would be like. The people were mostly young listeners, under 35.

Ogg at lvl q-10 is truly audibly transparent, no user including me can't tell OGG Q10 vs lossless apart, regardless of the music style.

I am not saying there is no lossy audibly transparent codec, but I know from experiment that Mp3 especially at 256 vbr is not audibly transparent if straining music is used, like dynamically compressed metal music. I think that if I mainly listened to jazz or classical, I probably could not tell them apart well, mp3 256 vs flac, even in my tests most users can't. But with rock and metal, they can, there's a strong bias towards those musisc styles in my articles too, since that's what composes most of my test playlist.

For the sake of experiments, try to experiment before leaning too much on other's statements.

This is why I don’t touch the cables on my HD800S with a 10 feet pole.. :)

u/blorg - This is exactly how I documented it too, and rings true with my findings. Two Android phones can show significant differences between how they handle AAC and the same for iPhone vs Android. iPhone always has superior AAC encoding regardless of the test.

I also agree that the high cutoff won't always matter as it is likely that most people can't hear above 18kHz or even 17kHz, but it shows the difference, and if you place them side by side you can hear some differences, it is not just the high end cutoff that's different.