I listened to Dream Theater again this morning, and my EQ didnāt hold up very well to fresh ears.
Thereās definitely something going on in the upper mids around 4 KHz. On well recorded stuff thereās a really nice energy, but on less well recorded stuff itās a bit much. Since this area can be affected by angled pads, I ordered some old-school Hifiman flat velour pads to try out.
In the meantime though, if the sound gets too aggressive, I simply wear the headphones backwards and voila, instant smooth!
Iām curiousāother people here who use the stock pads, how do you like the sound with the headphones on backwards? Am I nuts for kind of liking this, especially with stuff like metal/prog rock?
So for reference, on my soloist I use high gain and volume bypass (which is like 110% volume) with the he6 and attenuate volume with a passive preamp (little bear mc2) and turn the preamp down to about 40-50% to reach normal volume and before the supercharger that introduced a noticeable amount of noise but it still wasnāt as bad as the noise in the funk speaker taps. That being said, a supercharger might fix that but I never had one at the time to try. I think the funk is a solid option and itās much better than literally everything Iāve tried under $1k but I still think the clarity and separation in the speaker taps was a touch lacking, though the control was outstanding and every bit as good as the soloist with the supercharger. I think itās an option that you could definitely be pleased with but I do think the funk speaker taps are best left to speakers with more physical separation to make up for the lack of analog separation to make the speaker taps shine.
Hey @Pokrog, just pulled the trigger on a Burson Soloist 3X! LOL
After reading and watching a few reviews about this amp i decided i need to test it for myself, i bet it will be nice for the HE6se and for my LCD-X and LSA HP-2 as well.
Lets see how it compares to the Asgard 3 and the Drop 789!
NICE! itās a fantastic amp and iām sure youāll love it. on top of it being my favorite headphone amp iāve ever tried, the preouts on it are astonishingly good too on active speakers. high gain and volume bypass on the he6 with the volume controlled by a dac or preamp gives some seriously good driving power and down the line eventually a super charger is a pretty amazing upgrade as well. i didnāt notice the supercharger making a massive difference on some headphones but when the amp is getting maxed out in high gain it really helps hold things together and completely gets rid of noise.
itās basically just a nice power supply that pushes the noise coming through your wall outlet from like 50-60hz up to 170khz so you cant hear it anymore and from what i understand about the powering is that it does a better job keeping the capacitors inside the amp charged and the result is more consistent driving power. itās not a massive deal but it did make the bass noticeably clearer and the impact you gain from it being so much tighter and well controlled is nice too.
Nice, i see it is not super expensive so i will get it soon, just want to hear the original thing before i do that.
About the volume bypass, you mean having the Soloist at max volume and control the input volume from another device to take advantage of the āvoltage swingā?
theres a volume bypass mode if you hold down the little button next to the volume knob for like 12 seconds and it seems to equate to like 110%ish volume but it makes the volume knob not work. the volume chip inside the amp is really clean but if you use the bypass mode itās even cleaner. i donāt even use the volume knob anymore, i just swap between gain settings for different headphones with the he6 being the only one i use high gain on.
i use a little bear mc2 as a switch box but it also has a volume knob. i think iāve heard people say that lowering volume in windows lowers the bitrate so you lose quality.
Okay, I think I figured out the EQ recipe. In all my early go-rounds I fixated too much on the 4 KHz peak and the 2 KHz dip, and every attempt I made to tweak just those ended up losing some of the special sauce on this headphone.
Today I tried a different tack, namely boosting the lower mids rather than messing with the 4KHz peak.
Iāve got my library on shuffle right now, and so far so good. Dream Theater definitely sounds more filled in and less tizzy, but still has that HE6SE energy and tight bass that I love.
I think minor tweaks here and there can work, but I certainly feel the same way about strictly eqāing to a specific target. Every headphone Iāve owned that I really liked for one reason or another, if I try to stricly EQ it to Harman or whatever target, it loses what I loved about it. The DT 1990 was another great example of that. EQ down the treble to a more normal/less painful level, and suddenly it sounds dull.
This tells me a couple of things:
The people who say that headphones have significant sonic characteristics outside of frequency response are probably wrong, since I can certainly make ādetailedā headphones sound dull with the wrong EQ
The people who say that headphones with unusual frequency responses must sound bad are also wrong, since stuff like the HE6SE, DT 1990, LCD2, etc can all sound really awesome in their own way.
