Super Comfort - Super Musical Mods 04Jan18

As I await the big Schiit and I spend time in Summit, I made comfort and equalization adjustments to my headphones there. My Audeze LCD-2 open back planar magnetic driver cans are great but the single padded top band wasn't as comfortable as some of my others. I fashioned a new interior headband from a leather sample we had from prior furniture samples. There are "expensive" commercial alternatives but mine's cooler, homemade and feels great.

The ghetto repair on my AKG K702 open back dynamic headphones (previously described - using a rubber band to provide renewed elasticity to the headband) failed when the regular rubber bands decayed in ~1 year. I modified the ghetto fix to use black ranger bands instead. These blend in better and will last much longer.

The musicality & fidelity of both of these as well as my other cans are exceptional, but each displays it's own unique inherent biases and equalization. That's often why headphones are sold for folks who like a particular style of music (often an EQ curve they are targeting really). For instance House and EDM folks typically listen to bass heavy headphones. I prefer flatter, unadulterated sound - which in part has guided my own headphone choices. So, I dove for equalization software that would work in my Mac and Win10 sound chain environments - both of which include external DAC/AMP setups. I think I've found the best in Sonarworks... they make a couple products which caught my ear and they have a noteworthy augmented service. They measure a dozen samples of particular headsets from top vendors, they use these measurements to apply corrections to the digital music which flattens the response curves of the headphones. I first tried their Tru-Fi, easy to install, few dials, etc. but it worked as advertised (to my ear) for the headphones above and made them sound even better. This led me to try their "pro" offer called Reference 4 for just $20 more (I'm just trialing right now). Similar awesome result but more dials and feedback, which I like... I will buy Sonarworks Ref 4 Systemwide... worth it and I expect results will be even more pronounced on cheaper headphones really. I doubt it'll work on MQA or DSF files given how it funtions but no matter - I've largely put these aside for now.

Pulled the trigger on Ref 4. Sweet. I can't wait to invoke the corrections on stuff in COS too. The custom services I referenced are one off calibration curves for particular headphones - send 'em in and get 'em measured and receive perfect corrections. I dunno if I'll try it our use the averages - they don't have my MrSpeakers cans in the average list so...