Hahaha then I rest my case. I understand your and Zach’s points clearly!
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Has anyone pulled apart the various Fostex THxxx models to compare? No doubt the sound changes with the wood there, but has someone shown that all the dampening and internal shape etc has remained the same with those models?
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Tone woods obviously affect acoustic/classical instruments, and have been a point of intense debate with electric guitars. Some say that wood is important, while others say wood is unimportant. I can personally report that when you are playing an electric guitar, the differences in body/neck feel and tone can be quite obvious. However, these may not remain audible after processing, mixing, and recording. Electrical processing adds a huge set of additional variables.
With headphones, again you must consider whether the wood is integral to audio reproduction or just kind of sitting there on the side. You might feel the differences between woods by touching the cups more than you hear them. Furthermore, one should consider whether the frequencies present in musical content correspond to the resonant range of the wooden cups. The composition of the drivers (as plastic, paper, metal, etc.) will overshadow the passive components.
One of the better guitar comparisons I’ve seen involved creating three nearly identical guitars with different woods from wooden planks. I hear the differences, but part of this results from using thin wooden planks whereby some flex more than others:
For additional guitar analyses, also see this, this, and this.
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In my experience, yes, it does play a difference. I am lucky enough to own a pair of headphones which I literally saw making: the Hyland Headphones Saturn One. As I was interviewing Alex Hyland, who manufactures them, he showed me how the headphones were made (I have a host of pictures on the process which I have yet to publish). The cups of the headphones I have are made with mahogany, but Alex was so kind to let me listen to them side-by-side with zebrawood cups and another type of wood I can’t honestly remember. The differences were clearly there even if the headphones were exactly the same - same drivers, same gimbals, same working of the wood blocks.
As @generic says, the materials of the driver play a major role, but the materials of the earcups can influence that - whether that is true depends on how the materials are used. So even if wood may not alter sound in a major way, it does add its own acoustic component to the mix and I could definitely hear the differences with most headphones I tried as the wood was part of the acoustic chamber and not just a decoration.
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Look at the cups on the thxxx line compared to the ZMF cups. The Foster cups are super thin by comparison. More like a hollow body acoustic guitar. Not only does material density matter, but thickness does too. So does internal shape.
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Isn’t there already a discussion about this exact same topic somewhere on this forum?
As far as I can tell from a small sample size, yes the TH-X00 cups are all uniform in shape and thickness (though my EBs had a small knothole in the one interior… bleh, nervosa) and any audible and measurable differences are attributable to the woods used and the mechanical properties inherent to them. As said above, this is the same logic behind different tonewoods used in instruments— I don’t play, but listen to enough live that there’s distinct differences.
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When I had the demo VC I listened to it almost exclusively for a couple of weeks, once I got my set in I noticed the difference in sound… I even mentioned it to @Torq who then showed me this
https://www.zmfheadphones.com/wood
That should help clear up some of the questions… straight from @ZMFheadphones
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You mean like here?
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That’s the one. Probably should have topics merged.
Also likely should have used search function.
This guy has.
They’re identical. Same drivers, chassis, and baffling. The wood is the ONLY difference.
I know the wood brings different characteristics to the sound, that’s why there are traditional tone woods (which fall into the upper-mid of the Janka scale) used in the manufacture of musical instrument.
I can speculate as to why ZMF may downplay this. It would be difficult to manage variances and expectations when tuning of their headphones is already a common practice via “pad rolling”. If they agreed that the wood did indeed factor into sound more so than they admit, they would have to add that as an additional factor to model/pad. That’s a lot of work.
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Thickness absolutely affects sound, but it doesn’t negate the other sonic characteristics of the wood.
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Thanks @TylersEclectic!
That’s a great video @generic. It really demonstrates the difference in tone.
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Yes, that was part of the point I was trying to make.
Wood is a natural product, with a lot of variation within the same species due to different growing conditions and even within the same tree. It’s widely stated that “grapes that suffer” add more unique and interesting flavors to wine than grapes grown in ideal conditions.
I can’t envision headphone vendors who favor precision and clarity (e.g., Sennheiser, Focal) choosing to prioritize wood any time soon. Nor would mass-market vendors who seek a predictable buyer experience (e.g., Bose, Sony). However, wood is great for hobbyists, artists, tube-rollers, experimenters, etc.
Swamp ash is a popular wood for use in electric guitars because growing in wet conditions makes it lighter and more consistently resonant. To quote a guitar builder:
As a Luthier of 40 plus years (20 years of that at Fender Instruments ) , if someone sells me some Swamp Ash and what shows up isn’t extraordinary light and highly figured with great tonal qualities, they will be getting my check canceled and a load of phony Fraxinus genus back collect.
And for the record, Swamp Ash that does not come from growths in high moisture areas, often swampy areas, such as in Georgia, Texas, North Florida, South Carolina, etc have less figure, appealing color and tonal qualities. I know as I shopped sources and built the instruments at Fender
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IMHO in my experience (mostly with wooden cups for Grado-like headphones) the material a cup is made of matters only to a certain extent, and only when looked at in combination with the design of the cup, because both of these elements determine how “active” the cup and the material itself is in the entire headphone assembly, or how much it will contribute to the sound. In my experience, making the parts “rigid and inert enough” that they don’t get significantly “excited” by the driver/sound is the point beyond which it doesn’t matter what material the parts are made of anymore, given that their design elements that can influence the sound (such as cup volume, opening sizes, cup shapes, internal wall textures, etc.) are identical. At that point, the parts are passive. Most headphones that do use wood in construction are pretty massive, and well within that area where the wood itself is essentially just a passive element. Some aren’t, like some closed-back cups that are purposefully designed with relatively thin walls and to not be be perfectly inert, which is why the material and the design of a certain part always have to be talked about in combination. The thing is, when you start depending on the properties of the material itself and the effects it has on the sound of a headphone, you’re sort of entering a territory where you don’t have perfect control over it, and you’re sort of playing trial-and-error games. Sometimes the effect of a certain wood/design combination will give you pleasant effects, sometimes it won’t. For that reason, I’m not sure whether the benefits of using wood nowadays outweigh the limitations of design introduced when dealing with wood. Especially in this day and age when various advanced polymers with various reinforcements are available.
If you’re talking about relatively thin parts of headphones, like a big shell of a closed-back full sized headphone with relatively thin walls, then obviously the material it’s made of will have a certain effect on the acoustics of that cup. But if we assume the part is massive and rigid enough, which can be achieved both through use of very rigid materials (like for example carbon fiber reinforced polyamide that I use in some of my headphone builds), as well as certain design elements, such as internal bracing or similar reinforcement structures, then it would matter far less what material the cup is made of, because it would be inert enough anyway. To give you an extreme example, if you were to couple a driver to a 10 pound heavy ear cup made of concrete, and then to a 10 pound heavy ear cup made of iron, both with identical internal cup volumes and shapes, would it really make a difference? Would the sound of those headphone be any different because of different materials? It’s an extreme example, but it’s just to show the direction in which my argument is going, which is simply that, given the right part design for the material it’s combined with, the material sort of becomes secondary, and you could even say it just becomes a matter of aesthetics.
As for the comparisons of headphones to wooden instruments, the issue is that wood in such instruments is active, whereas the wood on headphones is mostly passive, preferably at least. Take a guitar for example. It’s a relatively speaking massive body made out of really, really thin wood, with a huge internal resonant volume relative to the amount / mass of wood used. That wood really does resonate audibly and it’s an active part of that instrument. On the other hand, a wooden cup isn’t an active part of a headphone in most cases, and even when the wood is purposefully made to be an active part, it’s active to an infinitely lesser extent than it is on instruments.
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About woods on headphones - I sure hope the mahogany and ebony TH-X00 don’t sound like the purpleheart. That was way boomy, bloomy, midbassy and bit of a mess allover any way I looked at it sound-wise. Measurements point too big difference in FR too. Compared them to my Denon D2000 before I sold them, no competition between these two Fostex biodynas.
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That’s because PH has a huge impact on the sound of those. And generally not a good one
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