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Comment by luto | Hacker News Reader

Unlikely, since the replacement part is the same for both models. From the link:

> 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”.

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If you buy a single they are not going to break up a matched pair and they will not refuse to sell you a single. The only way to really know is to sit down with a nice fresh and new pair of both headphones and compare the stereo image across the spectrum, but it is too late to do that for these unless someone happens upon some NOS examples.

Sorry, what is a NOS example? I'm not familiar with the abbreviation and it is hard to search for such short terms.

New Old Stock

New old stock, sealed unsold new product from the past.

BTW, a pro-tip, ChatGPT is quite good at abbreviations:

https://imgur.com/a/SB42IVR

I use it for abbreviations all the time.

And now you're adding more random assumptions to baseless statement

No I am relaying my experience. I never said this was the case for HD595/555, I said it could be the case and it is common practice. The only way to know for sure is a direct comparison on new examples, unless you have insider information at Sennheiser.

Got some bad news for you. "Matched pairs" is a marketing term. They are all tested within the same tolerances.

Depends. Some hifi headphones and speakrs are actually matched. Rare now, but used to be very common when driver designs and production tolerances were looser. I have some 1930's brandes headphines that were matched, but are basically a magneto driver and sound awful (but clear) by any modern standard.

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