I’ve discovered a fantastic use for these headphones. You can flip the cups so the ear pads face outwards, extend the yolks to their maximum lengths and wear it around your neck. Then put it to mac volume then you have a great pair of wired bose soundwears.
On a slightly more serious note, I actually kinda prefer the sound listening to the metal grille side rather than the earpad side…
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Have you tried EQ’ing at all? If you’re willing to take the time and EQ above ~1 kHz in steps of ~500 Hz it will open the headphones up a lot - it really fixed a lot of issues for me.
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Have you tried suggested mods? They are fully reversable and doable in less than 10 minutes.
- Take off the foam rectangle from the front of the driver
- Take off the fabric glued to the grills on the back.
I know, good headphones shouldn’t require mods or EQing to sound good, but these really start to sing after some mods and pads change are applied.
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How are vocals, imaging, and soundstage on these post-mod? I’m looking to buy these for games (more immersion than crystal-clear footsteps) and music. I’ve heard the bass and treble are pretty damn good post-mod, but mids, specifically strings and vocals are pretty important to me as well.
P.S.
These will be plugged into a schiit stack (modi/magni 2) for now. Looking into a THX AAA 789 and an undecided DAC.
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I find that post-mod that is what I hear as the biggest strength. Guitars and violins sound threaded or layered. Hard for me to explain but it’s definitely a strong suit. I’ve always loved Jim Croce, but hearing the guitar parts on this headphone post-mod with his songs is just amazing to my ears.
Nice, the only thing that concerns me now is the clarity of mids/highs, I cannot STAND that ‘veil’ over vocals that some headphones (like my K7xx’s) have, where it sounds like there’s something in between your ears and the sound. Probably gonna have to make a seperate topic to funnel some more opinions…
I’m not great at describing sound, but I’ll definitely give as much feedback as I can.
For me the vocals (especially the high parts) sometimes seem too close. I almost feel like I need to pull the earcups away from my ears a half an inch to enjoy the higher vocals in some songs. I don’t hear the veil some people have mentioned.
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That’s honestly probably what I want, besides, it sounds like that could be fixed with some larger pads, unless you already have some on there. I’m probably going to buy these on Amazon for the return policy, and eat the extra $50 if I really do love them.
They are definitely a weird headphone in the sense that one night I’m in complete and utter love and I can’t even imagine wanting something else. Then I’ll listen to a different song and I’ll think, “what happened to my detail?!”
Probably not a bad strategy to go the Amazon route.
It sounds like the rectangular foam under the earpad is your problem. I get the muffled, behind a wall, under a pillow, etc metaphor after I first tried it without the foam.
In stock form at first it did sound off to me. Some songs the vocals sounded distant and in some songs the vocals suddenly became too near. I still generally listen to them stock, and soundstage is a lot smaller feeling than other headphones, almost IEM level to my ears. But either they got better after more usage or my brain adjusted…
Maybe this weekend I’ll play around with mods. But so far changing the stock short pads to XL suede and hybrid dont appear to affect the sound greatly to me. I can feel the hybrids are warmer for sure in terms of ear temp. So maybe my hearing is bad or mine dont change that big enough with mods for me to notice.
That said im okay with the stock sound. 
Maybe i should change my handle to TheOutlier.
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Here’s what I’m using in equalizer APO right now, give this a shot -
GraphicEQ: 20.4 4.6; 26 4.9; 32.6 5.1; 40.2 5.1; 50 4.9; 63.3 4.6; 79.6 4.4; 99 3; 126.9 2; 158.7 1; 200 0; 250 0; 315 0; 400 0; 500 0; 630 0; 800 0; 1000 0; 1160.4 1.4; 1313.2 3.8; 1486.1 5; 1734.6 7; 2003.9 7.4; 2315 7; 2730.2 3.8; 2904.4 3.4; 2934.5 3.4; 3089.7 3.8; 3390.1 4.6; 3876.3 6.2; 4341.7 7.4; 4813.2 7; 5227 5.8; 5618.1 2.6; 5976.6 1.4; 6292.7 1.4; 6490.4 2.6; 6625.6 3.8; 6763.6 6.6; 6904.5 8.6; 7195.2 9.4; 7733.6 9.4; 8142.6 7.8; 8485.4 6.2; 9026.9 5; 9702.3 3.4; 10216 3; 10867 3.4; 12949 3.8; 15429 3.8
I’m not using an of the foam pieces (before and after the driver) and am using brainwavz XL microsuede pads. This sort of changed the whole tonality of the headphone for me in a good way though, so perhaps a good starting point even if our headphones aren’t setup identically.
I’m still tweaking and will upload a finalized eq with finalized mods at a later date.
edit - just felt I needed to add: All of these mods that people are doing really didn’t do much for me, the problem for me was bigger than what foam/pads could achieve on their own - they still sounded veiled and I just couldn’t get a tone out of them that I liked. These EQ setting literally made me go from “I think I need to sell these”, to, “holy shit, hold on a second”; a really substantial positive change.
I used equalizerAPO, then the tone generator slider I mentioned (https://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator) to get rid of the egregious peaks and valleys, then did an overall adjustment at the end through the upper-mids and treble to achieve the sound I liked best (and added a touch of bass of course 
)
People like it and people dont like it. That’s just how this hobby is.
What I dont like about it is the soundstage is pretty narrow. The foam under the stock earpads make them uncomfortable to wear for long periods and the headband is also rather uncomfortable compared to the HE4XX. Using the brainwavz or removing the foam when using stock solved that problem for the ear discomfort. Its not easy to tell at a glance which cable is left or right… but the left one is slightly longer so that is a tell. 
What I like is the sub bass, planar speed and tightness, more detailed and less sibilant than the HE4XX. In fact no sibilance for me. Balanced cable with the adapters, gotta expect it for the price. Modding is easy option and just as easy undo.
I like that it sounds different than the IEMs and headphones I have and I mainly bought it to replace the HE4XX which it really beats in pretty much all areas except comfort.
If people wanna give it time to break-in (either physically or brain burn in) or do the mods the options are there. Maybe they did change things after batch 1, who can really tell.
Bottom line I like the sound. Thats all that matters to anyone in the end. Good thing you have canjam and RMAF to demo stuff before you buy it and easy amazon returns which arent options for people like me.
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BIG ask:
For the people that dont like the sound would it be possible to share the specific song/music you hated the most out of the Phantoms and to what headphone or IEM you were comparing it to? And maybe a brief description of why it sounded like vomit on that track.
It would greatly help expand my musical collection as well as help others determine what you are hearing and maybe we are hearing the same thing and its really just how we perceive that sound to be pleasant or sounds like fart through a tube of toothpaste.
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Is there easy way of importing this preset? Can you export it to a file, please?
Going from Avia after 2 hrs and switching to Phantom I noticed a veil. When I start off with the fresh listening of the phantom I’m not aware of a veil.
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Train song for example…hd660’s tubed sound like i’m in a studio and listening to her through cans or studio monitors…the Phantoms?..like she’s live on stage…that’s what I get
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I’m not saying one is better than the other…just two sound different signatures and depending what genre or recording i’m listening to and how i’m feeling I love both 
No problem! Happy to help.
Here’s a link to the .csv file (I think it should work)
phantom_2_adjusted.csv - Google Drive
If you use equalizer APO you can open a new variable graphic equalizer and just copy paste the numbers from the previous post after hitting the edit button, or you can import this .csv.
I certainly agree with this to an extent, but I believe that the flaws in this headphone tonally come from specific deficiencies in the frequency response. Outside of going through the frequency spectrum and picking out what needs to be raised or lowered per frequency, I don’t think there’s a way to properly correct the sound.
For me it is such a large effect that the non-EQ’d headphone bothers me for literally all music, lol. I suppose really bassey electronic music sounded fine, and strings and vocals sounded the worst. Reminder that the 6XX was my daily for ~ 1 year before these came in, then the 400i before that.
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