Finished building an aftermarket DIY cable for my Sennheiser HD650's.
After some
trouble with the wire in the connectors, I cut further the wires and used the solder blob technique to remove the enamel insulation. Seemed to have worked, conductivity was excellent after that. Had to get quite close to the connector itself though, so very little stub left. Might change them eventually.
Used some electric tape to make the whole attachment a bit sturdier. Final looks are a bit getto, but I wasn't really aiming at a premium appearance, just best possible connectivity. Here a few pics:
Finalized cable next to my Zu Mobius:
The wire is Belden's teflon jacket, 18 awg, silver coated stranded copper wire. This is the same wire I used inside my Dynahi for the signal path. Here's a pic of the cable with the headphone endings marked before soldering the connectors:
Used four strands of that wire in this cable, so that each channel has its own ground path between the headphones and the plug. The cable was built according to this
four strand braiding technique. The plug is actually a very inexpensive generic one.
A couple of things that might explain sound differences between this cable and the Zu Mobius are the following: 1) Resistance, and 2) Polarity.
Measured the resistance shorting left and right channel at the plug, then connecting the multimeter to the left and right connector pins, so the resistance measured corresponds to twice the length of the cable. That's a longer electrical conductor, so provides a more accurate measurement.
My Zu is 10 feet long, the new cable is 11 feet long. I just used all the wire I had left; divided that total length by four and it gave that final length for this cable :-)
So the aftermarket is slightly longer than the Zu, yet its resistance is 0.2 Ohms, a third of the Zu which has 0.6 Ohms. To measure this properly, I factored out the resistance measured by the multimeter when connecting just the shorting wire. (Had to do this because this multimeter doesn't have any zero adjustment knob.)
Resistance of the shorting wire = 0.4 Ohms.
Resistance of the Zu = 1.0 - 0.4 Ohms == 0.6 Ohms:
Resistance of the new cable = 0.6 - 0.4 Ohms == 0.2 Ohms:
That might cause volume differences. Impossible for me to instant A/B compare, but it seems to me the new cable does provide a very slightly louder presentation.
Another minor difference: I switched the ground vs. signal pins. So the polarity is inverted with respect to the Zu and basically most other headphone cables. This will allow for some interesting comparisons.
here are a few DIY cables and headphone recables I've made:
Linear Mode
