Need help modding my pro 900

I need advice on a few things. Right now my pro 900 are balanced and have its 4 internal wires soldered to the headphone cable. I am going to replace the internal wiring (I just took apart the headphones and it seems possible to replace) with 18 awg mundorf solid core wires and connect it to a switchcraft TQG4M mini-xlr male connector which I just ordered, and I'll have to find a way to make it stay inside the headphone. I also ordered two TA4FL mini-xlr female connectors to plug into the new headphone jack.

What I need to know is what insulating material is good for the internal wires or would it be better to have no insulating material? I am thinking TPFE teflon would have the least detrimental effect from all the vibration from being inside the housing of the headphone right? Or maybe I should consider nylon, cotton for their dampening? But I'm afraid such dampening materials may stifle the sound.

Also, do you guys think it's a very bad idea to have the extra grounds from the mini-xlr's? It's already been ordered but maybe I'll try to cancel it if you guys think it's a horrible nono. It would be cool to have the detachable cable ability again which I lost from balancing.

Last question, what do you guys think of the silk sleeving at the bottom of this page Audio Catalog ? Should it be used over teflon or without teflon? I'm considering making a 4x 24 awg mundorf cable with teflon tubing inside the SILK-425 sleeving, or maybe 4x 18 awg mundorf cable, each in an individual SILK-315 sleeving. Any advice appreciated!

I decided not to go for the mundorf, little too expensive for me. I am getting 45 feet of the 24 awg silver wire on that hong kong website I linked above, 45 feet of teflon tubing, and 10 feet of that SILK-425. 5 feet of wire and tubing will be used for internal rewiring and the 40 feet will be used for a new headphone cable. Any advice on how to braid it? Lots of weird info. I think I'm all set now except for heatshrink and some kind of emf/rfi shielding. Any advice? I'm thinking to just get techflex mylar which looks like ghetto emf/rfi shielding but maybe it is good?

I did the internal rewiring and am going to solder it up later tonight. I didn't receive my connectors yet but I did the rewiring anyway because I am impatient and will add the connectors later if I haven't blown anything up (still have to solder ). Here's some internal pics of the pro 900, it was complete and utter torture rewiring, total of 3+ hours and was more complex than anything I ever encountered in origami.

http://img34.imageshack.us/gal.php?g=cimg0102i.jpg

Drew of moon-audio recommended a few times that I did dual-entry instead of single-entry modding and now I know he was right lol. In case anyone is interested, the space from left to right cup only allows two wires with an outer diameter of 1.21mm each as the very max, and you have to remove the teflon from one conductor for 0.5" to pass through each orbiting thing above the cups. The length of the internal wiring is 28" for the right cup and 3" for the left. Whenever you adjust the headphones the internal wiring can go through hell as seen in picture #2, especially with two solid conductors . Since I managed to do it I guess it's okay, but if it snaps from adjusting I'm just going to do dual-entry, better and easier (and cheaper, you don't want to know how much I spent on a few mini-xlr connectors because I couldn't find any other 4-pin solution lol).

It's been 4 weeks since I ordered my stuff and I still haven't received the TQG4M from onlinecomponents.com . My patience has ended and I decided to just use duct tape to hold the cable in place. The 99.99% 24 awg silver cable sounds quite bad, only possibly good thing I hear over blue dragon is more middish emphasis and cleaner/analytical sound which is not good for me because I am trying to make the pro 900 sound more fun. The loss in emotion and vocals sucks. I hope things get much better after burn-in, but if not I might just hardwire the blue dragon.

Some more pics if anyone is interested in how to remove the gold ring so you can replace it with a pretty rubber grommet (2.50 from Moon-audio) when hardwiring your ultrasone. First remove the 4 screws and take off the bufferboard, then putting something like one very fat flat head screwdriver or one of the two prongs on a power cable plug underneath the six plastic "ledges" (where you twist earpads underneath) to lever the shell out of its glue. These ledges are glued down on 3 points EACH so you must be extremely soft levering up and you should do so every quarter inch at least or you may break the plastic shell (like I did, see the top of the first pic). If while levering the shell goes up a distance without hearing the glue snap off, you are levering between glue spots and must move a little to a new spot directly underneath a glued area or risk breaking the shell. Once the shell is removed, slide that gold ring out, it's a little tight fit but not glued. The shell can be glued back with ideally hot glue (don't overdo it you might want to take it off again in the future), look at picture 2 and you will see this plastic sticking out on the shell, that part goes directly over the screw-in area, orientate it this way or it will not go in completely. If you choose not to glue it back for the time being that's okay because the 4 screws will hold it down, but probably should be glued to ensure no resonance.

I should send my mutilated pro 900 in for repair as a prank , see if they can identify the headphones.

Ultrasone headphones with detachable cables have the grounds combine 3 inches from the left driver and 26 inches from the right driver. When I first tried balanced it was also the first time I separated the left and right channel grounds of my pro 900 so I was unable to tell which caused the significant improvement in sound I noticed. Just yesterday I finally got all I needed to complete my kooky mods of putting a 4-pin connector on my headphones, replacing the internal wiring and making a couple cables, one of them was a 3 foot canare L-4E6S for portable use, and the grounds only combine at the mp3 end of my portable cable. After 5 hours of abx'ing I think I may have to attribute the majority of the gains I first presumed was due to going balanced to making the grounds either separate or further from each other. Or maybe the 60cent/foot canare cable is just so awesome hehe. Right now with all the cables unburned-in, my $50 mp3 player has about all the ambient soundstage, depth, and vocal fullness of my $2000 setup, only drawbacks are just rather thumpy details across the board and toylike background. But sh*t, I never thought my pro 900 would get this sort of soundstage straight from an mp3 player in a million years.

I will let all my cables burn in for a hundred hours each before I test again, and I an contemplating to afterwards buy more canare cable and more connectors to test.