Here’s some potentially good news about replacement pads for the original Clear.
In a post above, @reallyoldcob’s new, replacement pads were of a different thickness to his old, worn-in ones. He and I were concerned that these difference might affect the sound of the headphones. I was also concerned that Drop and its customers had encountered unit variations in Elex pads a year ago (the ones currently on sale are said to be fine). Did all this speak to problems with Focal’s QC (or its supplier’s, if the pads weren’t made in-house)? Did it mean you’d be forking out a bunch of cash for replacement pads that might not, in fact, be exact replacements?
I picked up a new, replacement pair of the original Clear pads a couple of weeks ago. Lo and behold, they’re of a different size to my worn-in pads, which are at least two years old (I purchased my Clear used). In both photos the old pads are on the left:
I realize these aren’t the best photos (and my phone’s camera isn’t exactly perpendicular or perfectly horizontal/vertical to the pads). But I measured the pads and had the same findings, more or less, as @reallyoldcob:
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The old, worn-in pads: the outside thickness of both the pads at the bottom, i.e. where the seam runs across the pad, is 23 mm. (The seam faces down when the pads are on the headphones).
Both pads’ thickness on the side, i.e. 90 degrees around from the seam and where the pads are the thickest, is 26mm. -
The new replacement pads: not only are the pads different in size to the old worn-in ones but they’re also different to each other at 20 and 22 mm. The thickness at the sides again varies, at 21 and 22 mm. Put another way, that’s a 4-5mm difference in thickness, which would seem to be pretty significant.
The good news is that, in some slapdash A/B blind comparisons, I couldn’t reliably hear differences in the sound of my Clear with these replacement pads vs my old ones.
Admittedly, I don’t have the best hearing - I’m in my mid-40s and have suffered some hearing loss. Also, my testing was far from scientific or rigorous. (My wife indulged me and switched the pads over without me seeing which ones were which). And before deciding to do a blind test, I’d compared the pads and had convinced myself that the new replacement pads were slightly bassier and warmer, and that treble was less well extended with them. When I did the blind A/B comparisons, though, I couldn’t reliably pick out the new vs the old pads; in several tests I did no better than pick them out correctly half of the time.
So, all of this is to say that while the pads are different, physically, to my ears they don’t make for a difference in the sound—at least insofar as I can tell. And all of this, of course, disregards how the aging process of the pads - as the material stretches, flexes, and absorbs moisture - may affect everything, or not.