If this is the wrong area I’ll apologize, but I got sick of the long cable on my headsets. I found a video online of a similar mod to an older ath-m50 headset, so I ordered up some parts and went to town.
One of the early issues I faced was the delicate internal wires of the headset being damaged during the re-assembly process where the new headphone jack pressed on the wire, breaking the solder connection on the PCB.
I replaced the original wiring with 3 strands from a cat 5 cable, the added bonus being a slightly thicker wire than the stock cable.
I can take some shots of the internals if there’s any interest but here’s the finished product.
did these mods increase the amount of ohms required to drive the headphones at all?
I'm not sure how to test, (multimeter maybe?) but running them without the amp that you see in the picture I can still get good audio out of my phone and my laptop, so I'm tempted to say no.
thats cool, was this just an asthetic mod with some wire replacement or did you mod the drivers at all?
There's a little modification to the driver housing. Here's the internal images.
You can see there was one post that was the cord wrap that had to be removed, I used a drill bit for this step.
After attaching the wires to the female jack I wrapped some tape around the connector and filled it with hot glue (checked the connection with an aux cable + a multimeter before this step) This acts as both a cable relief and stops the leads from shorting out.
I also had to cut a channel in the back pad (white) for the cable to run through.
After making the plug with the hot glue I twisted the leads together to make them easier to run, and then soldered them to the contact points on the PCB. After that I put some hot glue over the solder points, mostly as strain relief. My solder job isn't actually bad, you're seeing it through the hot glue in this picture.
I also placed a glob of hot glue over the black wire leading to the other ear cup because I didn't want to risk having to re solder that cable since audiotechnica uses some kind of coating on their cables, which makes them less than fun to work with.
Finally I cut a chunk out the plastic driver holder to allow the headphones to close with the headphone plug installed. Without this plastic chunk being removed the headset wouldn't close. I tried to leave as much of the padding in place as possible.
The main purpose of the mod was to let me use different length cables on my headset so I wouldn't have to deal with the 10 foot cable that was permanently attached to them when I was traveling, more functional than aesthetic.
