After several years of wear and tear, or even shorter periods of particularly intensive use, replacing the ear pads on PRO headphones can bring a real boost in terms of sound. The pad material can deteriorate over time, with sweat and dust causing further detrimental effects. Consequently, your over-ear headphones may no longer perfectly surround your ears and fail to provide an acoustic seal. This can have a negative effect on sound quality – once air is allowed to escape from the space between ear pad and ear, bass response is impaired. Low-frequency sounds are then no longer directed straight into your ear, some of them get lost on the way. An ear pad’s foam filling can deteriorate over time as well, losing its shape and becoming softer. When this happens, the ear pads are subject to greater compression during use of the headphones, affecting the sound across the entire mid-range and bass areas. In both cases, worn-out ear pads can result in clearly audible differences in sound quality, noticeably upsetting the fine balance between bass, mid-range and treble.