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help with DIY headphones


Tjj226_Angel

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How do you even possibly manage to do damage like that to your hand?

 

I have only ever once burnt myself (heat transferred along solder doesn't count) with a soldering iron and that was with my portable Weller gas one. Working in a car I rested it in my lap as I spliced some wires and well it slipped. Burnt through my shorts and got the inner thigh.

 

In honor of this thread, I vote we have a "ghetto mods" thread, just like our local forum eh?

 

@ Tjj, wonder how they sound? looks like a very strange project to me

 

 

Well that is kind of where I am stuck to be honest. If you look at the picture where I have the headphones as just a frame, I was able to put on a make shift headband for testing, and put two bits of foam on my temples and wore them like the AKG K1000. They actually sound pretty damn good like that, but the highs are a bit too harsh. That isn't surprising, since the drivers were designed to go in closed headphones. 

 

The flip side is that the mids are pretty much perfect. I prefer the mids and the bass on these than the Q701s and even the sennheiser 650hd. But they still sound a little harsh and tinny in the highs which is something I can not forgive since all I pretty much listen to is led zeppelin which is almost all high frequencies. 

 

Adding the cups definitely tones down the highs a bit, but it also screws over the mids, and the bass becomes a nightmare with all the back wave resonance. After adding some wool and cork to the cups, they sound a heck of a lot better, but it still isn't perfect yet. 

 

If I can hit the sweet spot on these headphones, they will probably be one of the first closed headphones I actually like. 

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In honor of this thread, I vote we have a "ghetto mods" thread, just like our local forum eh?

 

OH Im so for this... :woo:

 

Plus l have never seen a DYI headphones. This is cool. Keep up the banging of the knuckles.

 

P.S. Yes a $5 soldering iron, SUCKS!!!. But the weller one you have there, they are so big and heavy and hard to get into small spots.So yes get a good iron.

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In honor of this thread, I vote we have a "ghetto mods" thread, just like our local forum eh?

 

OH Im so for this... :woo:

 

Plus l have never seen a DYI headphones. This is cool. Keep up the banging of the knuckles.

 

P.S. Yes a $5 soldering iron, SUCKS!!!. But the weller one you have there, they are so big and heavy and hard to get into small spots.So yes get a good iron.

 

 

Just wait until I start my headphone amp and dac. Plus I will be making electrostatic headphones once I can find a way to make a bunch of little holes on a PCB accurately. 

 

Believe it or not, but on head-fi, there is a whole thread for making electrostatic headphones (some of which have truned out to sound like the stax 007/009 for under 100 bucks.) but there is not a single thread for dynamic headphones like these. (these by the way are just a prototype)

 

The only complaint I really have about this gun is the tips suck. I prefer a pencil tip for this type of an application. However, I do like the fact that as soon as you pull the trigger on this, it gets hot almost instantaneously. And when you let go, it cools pretty rapidly as well. It is great if you are working in a cramped space and you don't want to worry about damaging other stuff around you with a hot gun. 

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The only complaint I really have about this gun is the tips suck. I prefer a pencil tip for this type of an application. However, I do like the fact that as soon as you pull the trigger on this, it gets hot almost instantaneously. And when you let go, it cools pretty rapidly as well. It is great if you are working in a cramped space and you don't want to worry about damaging other stuff around you with a hot gun. 

 

Use a file and shave down the end of the tip to a point. As the tips that come with these are like a big fist and suck for what your doing.

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Be careful with that gun, even on the lowest setting it is way too hot for small electronics. The pencil iron should have worked fine for this, unless you had too thick or the wrong type of solder.

 

You can melt plastic pieces and unsolder components next to what you are soldering by accident.

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How do you even possibly manage to do damage like that to your hand?

 

I have only ever once burnt myself (heat transferred along solder doesn't count) with a soldering iron and that was with my portable Weller gas one. Working in a car I rested it in my lap as I spliced some wires and well it slipped. Burnt through my shorts and got the inner thigh.

In honor of this thread, I vote we have a "ghetto mods" thread, just like our local forum eh?

 

@ Tjj, wonder how they sound? looks like a very strange project to me

Haha yup I have wasted hours on that thread, pretty interesting what people do.

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Who is taking or has taken a materials engineering class and understands wave physics and can tell me what the absolute best acoustical dampening material is.  :)

 

A couple inches of fiberglass insulation bat. Not usefull in headphones but very usefull in sound absortion panels or speaker cabinets.

 

For headphones you would be best off with poly fill or similar material even pulled apart cotton buds would work, felt too.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Update: So I have finished the headphones. Surprise surprise, I think I got the dampening wrong. There are certain songs that sound better than my AKG Q701s, and there are others that are just plain awful......and I do mean awful. 

 

I have never seen a pair of headphones that are so bipolar in terms of sound quality. 

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pictures of finished headphones?  What do you think would have gave you better results?

 

Hard to say really. First off I think I should have gotten some professional dampening material such as this stuff here http://www.parts-express.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?partnumber=260-317 .

 

Poly fill can sometimes be found at craft and fabric stores, but I could not find it for the life of me, so I went with 100% wool and separated all the fibers and turned it into animal based poly fill in a sense. 

 

I also think there is just too much dampening material to begin with. 

 

The other big thing that I am not really liking are the pads that I made, you will see from the pics in a second that the pads are a bit meh, They fit well and feel pretty good, but do to the contruction of the headband, they make a gap on the back of my ear, so the isolation isn't all that great. If I could bend the stupid frame, it should be just fine. 

 

Other then that, I am really at a loss. I can listen to lindsey sterling all day long on these. She sounds utterly fantastic. But stuff like led zeppelin and classic rock seems to suffer a bit. 

 

I am sure if I had a degree in sound engineering I could tell you more, but I really don't know. 

 

As for things I would do differently with the construction, it would have to be that I would make the cups square. The reason why is because by the time you are done dampening the cups, the shape really won't matter. Plus you will have a shit ton of time on the construction of the cups AND they will look a hell of a lot nicer too. Another plus would be that making the pads would probably be a million times easier. 

 

Oh I also would have used much thinner wire. Sometimes people use Cat 5 ethernet cable for headphone wire. But the 6 gauge wire I have is a real SOB to work with.

 

Yet another thing that I think would have been a MASSIVE help would be to have run the left channel headphone cable up through the top of the left cup, wrap it around the frame and down into the left cup and put a 3 pin XLR jack at the bottom of the right side cup. Then I would have made essentially a detachable wire. Alternatively you could separate your ground wires and have a 4 pin XLR cable going to a balanced headphone amp, but then again this is a starving college kid style headphone, not a "I have thousands of dollars worth of audio gear" headphone. 

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