I agree with several suggestions here including cleaning your ears. I suspect that most here are male and older and thus already losing high frequency hearing. Ear wax build-up definitely makes this worse.
I also recently tightened the drivers in their mounts and was surprised how loose they had become although the effect on sound was not very obvious.
A number of persons whose opinions I respect have praise cyro treatment of materials including Stax plastic headphone cases. However I am not clear on what effect this is supposed to have on the sound and what physical principle is involved. I am guessing that it may have something to do with damping characteristics of the material, i.e. it changes the plastic so that it dampens the vibrations going into the surrounding material from the drivers. Grado claims to have a proprietary polycarbonate for its headphone cases which does this and enhances dynamics and attack and it may be something along this line.
My own take comes from making fair number of tests of the use of sorbothane on headphones (mostly Stax) and speakers. This work is covered in my postings over a couple of years here https://www.head-fi.org/threads/damping-mechanical-energy-distortion-of-stax-and-other-phones-with-s...
Essentially I am finding that extensive damping, in my case with dense (70 duro), smallish sized pieces, properly glued to surfaces and backed with layers of, in my case, electrical tape to provide "constrained damping" has a massive effect on sound quality, in terms of detail, clarity, dynamics, and with phones stereo separation.
There are several companies working on this problem. Sennheisser has been adding polymer materials as damping for years in their TOL dynamics and I would imagine also in their electrostatic and noting it in their adds although it seems not to be noticed by the fans of their phones. I am confident that we will see a lot more of this in the future.
The costs of damping phones is generally only a dollar or two (although my glue is quite expensive) . For speakers you might use $50 or more of sorb.
I also recently tightened the drivers in their mounts and was surprised how loose they had become although the effect on sound was not very obvious.
A number of persons whose opinions I respect have praise cyro treatment of materials including Stax plastic headphone cases. However I am not clear on what effect this is supposed to have on the sound and what physical principle is involved. I am guessing that it may have something to do with damping characteristics of the material, i.e. it changes the plastic so that it dampens the vibrations going into the surrounding material from the drivers. Grado claims to have a proprietary polycarbonate for its headphone cases which does this and enhances dynamics and attack and it may be something along this line.
My own take comes from making fair number of tests of the use of sorbothane on headphones (mostly Stax) and speakers. This work is covered in my postings over a couple of years here https://www.head-fi.org/threads/damping-mechanical-energy-distortion-of-stax-and-other-phones-with-s...
Essentially I am finding that extensive damping, in my case with dense (70 duro), smallish sized pieces, properly glued to surfaces and backed with layers of, in my case, electrical tape to provide "constrained damping" has a massive effect on sound quality, in terms of detail, clarity, dynamics, and with phones stereo separation.
There are several companies working on this problem. Sennheisser has been adding polymer materials as damping for years in their TOL dynamics and I would imagine also in their electrostatic and noting it in their adds although it seems not to be noticed by the fans of their phones. I am confident that we will see a lot more of this in the future.
The costs of damping phones is generally only a dollar or two (although my glue is quite expensive) . For speakers you might use $50 or more of sorb.