The actual difference between the two models could be that the HD595 had selected and matched drivers, the HD555 getting all the rejects from the 595. This is a fairly common practice.
Sennheiser likes to reuse parts across their headphones lineup. They have several current models that look similar despite tiny internal differences but have substantially difference frequency response due to those tiny changes.
This is always going to anger the people who think the cost of objects should be based solely on the cost of materials. I find that especially ironic for a a website where most of us work on software products where the cost of running and distributing the software is vanishingly small and produces margins these hardware companies could only dream of.
So it is not about looking the same with different internals .. it basically is the same just without the dampening.
It’s hard to make electronics that are identical. It’s easier to make them such that they fit within buckets of tolerances.
Without proper testing, it’s hard to know for certain
But I'm willing to bet that at the lower end it's not worth the end. These aren't studio grade.
Though it's also common to segment products that don't have defects/differences by intentionally hobbling them, or even just using different labels when there's no actual difference.
If you're into matched pair speakers, what about for surround systems? Do you have to have a matched 4 set or a matched 6 set?
Hopefully someone more knowledgeable in 3d sound will happen along.
Edit: Should also mention that we get a lot more leeway in general when it comes to film sound since we also have visual cues regarding the sound's location and movement.
For sounds coming from on screen, maybe, but the point of rear surround speakers is to get sounds from behind you where you have no visual clues. So that sort negates this argument. Although, I'm not really sure where the whole visual cue argument comes into play when deciding how matched pair vs non-matched stereo imaging sounds to people. A matched pair vs non-matched is not going to suddenly not sound stereo.
These examples are not exactly accurate to the real world, meant more to demonstrate the problem but we can hear it easily, this is a big part of why some speakers/headphones sound muddy and have poor deffinition. With more simple sources this is not much of an issue but as complexity increases the lack of matching becomes more noticeable.
In surround the rear speakers can be quite bad before issues arise since the shape of our ears and our head means we are not great at pinpointing the location of sounds behind us, we hear hard left and hard right behind us well but we have a dead spot between where things are not quite so clear. I would suspect some of the rear is also mixed into the fronts which would help, hard panning tends to be avoided as it does not sound natural. As I said, the surround stuff is a best guess on my part, I suspect I am in the ballpark but lack some of the nuances.
So, in response to replacing drivers, 'it depends' is probably closer to the truth. It may well be that bass drivers are less problematic than say midrange when pairing.
It does depend, we don't always need or want that perfect stereo image but it makes mixing easier to have it available.
> Quite a few people speculated in my Original thread that the more expensive HD595 headphones must also be using a more expensive driver. However, Head-fi member MCC posted the smoking gun; a picture of the original Sennheiser replacement driver labelled “HD 555 / HD 595”.
So, unless they're fucking over their 595 customers who need a repair: the drivers aren't binned.
There definitely was a period where AMD was shipping three-core Phenom IIs with a functional fourth core (demand was higher for the three-core SKUs than their actual defect rate appeared to allow), but I don’t know how plentiful fully-functional one’s actually were. And it was never guaranteed.
"By the power of graphite!", I upgraded my cheaper CPU to a more expensive one.
Skeletor failed to show, however.
- AMD K6-2+ with 128K of L2 cache can be converted to a K6-3+ with 512K. The CPU has a heatspreader that can be carefully removed revealing a series of zero-ohm resistors, moving it to the right location unlocks the cache. The CPU is still bound by binning as to whether or not it can be overclocked well.
- AMD Athlon XP could be overclocked with the "pencil mod", using a pencil to draw a conductive trace between two pads on top of the CPU, no delidding required.
Regarding the use of a 0-ohm resistor instead of a jumper wire: wires are rather annoying to deal with in pick-and-place machines, while a 0-ohm jumper can be reel-loaded like any other part.
This was a soft mod, but I think there was also a hardware mod involving only a pencil.
iirc, the CPUs come off the same manufacturing line--but the ones they sold as 3.2ghz vs 3.4ghz were based on stability tests. It was the same chip, just that some came out the oven better than others. So they would cap it and slap a label on it, which is why overclocking is feasible but inconsistent.
> It was the same chip, just that some came out the oven better than others.
Not the part about selling.
I got my i9-9900k this way, they binned it for 5.1GHz and it had been working 24h non stop for a few years (it is still working fine, but I no longer have a need for it to run).
> Quite a few people speculated in my Original thread that the more expensive HD595 headphones must also be using a more expensive driver. However, Head-fi member MCC posted the smoking gun; a picture of the original Sennheiser replacement driver labelled “HD 555 / HD 595”.
I use it for abbreviations all the time.
What’s with the downvotes? Sorry for being one of the only commentators in this thread to have actually tried it, and for saying what happened. There is one other actually, who also says the sound got worse
My point is you should try randomly at least couple of headphones that some other person removed the foam on one of them without you even knowing. Then you could apply some simple test like the binomial, and claim/reject one of them gives you headaches.
Quality of sound has a abjective part (a speaker too loud would sound broken to every one), and a heavy subjective part (a speaker with too much bass would sound great to some, bad to others). If someone say "this headphones sound bad" it means almost nothing.
I hate the sound of every guitar with single coil pickups, even the most expensive Fender Tele/Strato, but a lot of guitarist love their sound. I cannot claim "the single coil sounds worse" as if it was an objective thing that everyone should agree to, because what I really mean is "I don't like single coils".
On reddit, i've written some carefully researched little posts and gotten 1-2 downvotes so i'll downvote myself and see what happens.. sometimes it's a trickle of more downvotes, sometimes i get the upvotes i think it deserved.
At the root of it, products are all designed to be as cheap as possible to produce while meeting the product requirements. Beats are positioned as a "premium fashion" product, not a audiophile sound product, and when you are selling that type of product look and feel is very important to get right to justify the high price. The price of a product has very little to do with the actual cost in such a market, where high prices convey status and drive the desire to purchase the product to show they are more well off than those that can't afford it.
On the product design side, the design isn't even that egregious. Most of the weight is the headphone slider mechanism, where metal is a better choice as metal riding on plastic is going to be more durable and feel better than plastic on plastic unless materials and design are very carefully considered. The other two parts are just light cosmetic parts that absolutely were designed to be accents that looked good, and give that premium look (at extra cost, they could have just painted plastic metallic for less). It isn't like they took a couple pieces of pot metal and glued them inside the earcups to make them heavier, both parts have a function even if one is primarily cosmetic.