BigMac, does the UR40 folding mechanism look sturdy enough that it won't snap after awhile? Thanks for the entertaining walkthrough with photos! Very hardcore

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No chance of them falling off They're pretty tight -- the main difference between them is that the UR40 pads are a bit less oval than the V6 pads, but overall they have about the same circumference.


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It seems pretty sturdy for the price, although I haven't worn them down enough yet to see how long it'll last

great hopefully these are durable and the beyer pads will fit.

*waiting on MacDEF's sound analysis*...

at last, the review i was longing for is being born!!!

Mmmmm. Interesting.

No wonder it's $25 - that is the KSC-35 inside! But even if it's not as good as the 35/50 it's a very smart move on the part of Koss - absolute sound may not be good as, but a degree of isolation will help bring out the mid/bass in an urban environment and disturb less.

I'm presuming that the foam pad between the driver/grille is very dense?





And going by Koss's "KSC-35 driver for everything" strategy, is their electrostatic unit two squashed KSC-35 drivers with cat fur and a battery?

Damn I really like these headphones. Too bad they have two
cables I would guess there is no real easy way of modding it
so you end up with only one right? Eh.. :\

Btw, is that silver-ish material plastic or metal? Because on their
site they repeat 'titanium' a lot of times and I was wondering
if the titanium was that silver thing outside the phones or a
certain object in them.

Mac:

where did you buy these from?

On the web i can barely find much info on them, much less english websites that sell them...

and $30? wow....koss has them listed on their site for $40...

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For 30 bux, I'm pretty sure they didn't make them out of titanium. The literature says that they have titanium drivers, which I think is just the equivilant of a spray coating of titanium, or a small amount of titanium mixed in with the material they use to make the diaphragms. It probably makes them a bit more rigid to have an overall more accurate sound.

Looking at the overall design of the headphones, I think the greatest enemy to the sound, next to the thick padding over the driver, will be the overall thin nature of the plastic, which will vibrate with the driver and color the sound. MacDEF, how exactly does the driver connect with the front plate? Do you think it would be possible to insert some sort of thin rubber gasket between the driver and the face plate to acoustically isolate its vibrations?

Mac:

sorry if i sound pushy....but just curious have they burned in yet? its been like what, 4 days?

Have you tried the koss r80's? There mrsp is $50 and they were the last pair of phones I bought before I found this place and they are closed although quite large.

Biggie.

Well, I broke down and got the UR40's here at Circuit City.

First impressions: these are NOT KSC-35's. As you may have read earlier in the thread, I am looking for a portable headphone that will be a neater solution than my franken50's. While plugged into the headphone out of my Pana 570 portable listening to A Perfect Circle's Mer de Noms CD, my first minute impression was that the bass was muddy, the midrange blurry and indistinct, and the upper treble a touch peaky.

After listening for awhile, I decided to pull them apart. Mac is 100% correct: the earpads feel and look nearly identical to the pads for the V6. I took them off, unscrewed the three small screws holding the faceplate on, and removed the face plate. The driver is set into the faceplate and covered by what I can only describe as a 'hairy' looking fabric. The drivers are indeed 35/50/Sporta/Porta drivers. Behind the drivers stuffed into the cavity between the driver and the grille is a thick piece of foam, which is not glued or secured in anyway.

My first mod was to remove this foam, as I suspected it was a major cause of the warm bass. After re-assembling the headphone, I discovered I was correct. The blurriness of the midrange mostly went away, and I was now able to tell instruments apart much more readily. The midbass was less present, but it still has an over warmth that I do not care for.

I put the Beyer pads from my V6's on the headphones, and another improvement in sound came from getting the drivers a little farther from your ears, lightening the bass and opening up the soundstage a touch. I would call this a last 5-10% mod: if you already like the sound of the headphones, this might be a reasonable mod to take it into audio nirvana. But if you don't like the sound, this mod will not make enough of an improvement in the sound to be worth paying half again the cost of the headphone.

One major distinction between the 35/50/Sporta/Porta drivers and the drivers on the UR40 is the length of the cord. The UR40 cord is double the length of the standard cord, and compared to my 35, it is MUCH thinner. I don't know if the wires themselves are any thicker, but the insulation certainly is. For poops and giggles, I transplanted the drivers from my 35's into the body of the UR40. The drivers are set in by three tabs, one on the top and two on the bottom, that are upside down U shaped and attached to the faceplate on one side and free on the other. I pushed back the tab from the back and used a flat head precision screwdriver pushed through the 'hairy' fabric on the front to push the driver out of it's hole. I repeated this on another tab and was able to free the driver. I did this again on the other side and re-assembled the headphone.

I found the sound greatly improved. The soundstage was good, instrument seperation good for a headphone of this kind. The warm, detail obscuring midbass was still there, though.

I suspect that a no-additional cost mod for this headphone might be to take the foam removed from behind the driver and cutting a hole in it the size of the driver, and placing it between the faceplate and the earcushions. This way, you have the additional distance from the driver that the beyer pad would offer, and you also have a thick piece of foam covering the hard plastic of the faceplate, which I suspect is much of the cause of the undesirable cause of the midbass/lower midrange coloration.

I will do this mod later and report back.

how much were the UR40's at circuit city?

im a little confused here.

Is the driver permanently set into the faceplate?

Also, the pics are kinda dark so its hard to tell whats going on on the front of the faceplate. Does the front have a hole in it?

maybe if someone might be able to take some more pics, but hopefully with really good lighting...

I'm answering a bunch of questions below -- I'm still holding off on too much commentary on the sound, since I'm a firm believer in burn-in. They been running non-stop since I got them, though, so I'll probably chime in on their sound over the next day or two


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The KSC-35 cable is double-stranded (two cables next to each other) -- the UR40 cable is exactly the same thickness as *one* of the KSC-35 strands.

As for length, the cord is 4 feet, so it's pretty long.



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Yes



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Not "very" dense, but not open, either. That said, the foam seems to actually hurt the sound -- I removed both foam inserts and the sound cleared up just a bit. However, removing the foam makes the UR40 even more "open" then they were originally (which was already quite open); that said, they still sound a lot like closed cans.



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The earpiece enclosures themselves and the hinges they attach to are silver-colored plastic. The grey grills are metal.

The "titanium" specs refer to the drivers -- which really aren't titanium, either. As the pictures I posted in the KSC-35 vs. KSC-50 thread (from a few months ago) show, the drivers are thin plastic, but (as Jeff suggested) seem to simply have a silvery coating on them.


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I bought mine from efunctional.com:
http://store.yahoo.com/efunctional/ur-40.html

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See above

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No, these are just KSC-35 drivers clamped onto the black plastic faceplate.

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Not sure what you mean. The black plastic faceplate has a hole just big enough for the driver to be exposed. In addition, there is a piece of very thick felt-like material covering the driver opening (you can see it in my pictures above). I actually cut a hole in this felt because it was clearly "veiling" the sound.



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Jeff, this seems odd -- since the KSC-35 and UR40 use the same drivers, swapping them shouldn't change the sound of the headphone. Your experiment leads me to believe that your KSC-35 drivers are significantly burned in compared to the brand new UR40 drivers.

Noone laughed at my cat fur joke...

Sob.