Custom Creative Aurvana Live! - Disassembly, Painting and (possibly) Recabling

1) No idea  , just remove all the screws ( if any ) and make sure you don't force anything .

2) Try a paint stripper ( look for one that can be used on plastic ) and if sanding is necessary  use 600 grit minimum ( any coarser and it will leave deep grooves in the plastic ) and finish with 1200 grit ( or higher ) . Use a plastic primer ( general purpose primers don't work well on plastics ) and spray paint ( brushing leaves visible brush stokes no matter how fine the brush is ).

3) re-cabling  usually make a difference ( maybe not "massive" ) - entry level headphones ( and even some higher end ones ) usually have thin, low quality cables that brake easily  , have high resistance ( due to thin conductors ) and sometimes high capacitance ( that can have and adverse effect on sound ) and the plugs are sometimes low quality . In conclusion a good cable with a good plug ( and I'm not talking about insanely priced "audiophile" crap ) will give you a at least a more reliable headphone if not a better sounding one .

Good luck with your project .

Post pics when finished.

It's my opinion that the D1001's cable is especially bad, and that the effect of recabling it is not normal.

I am not sure if how the cable on the CAL compares to the D1001, but I imagine the same thing will happen.

If you're going to go through all that trouble, you might as well recable them!

My experiance (it's been a while but)

Recabling them smooths out the frequency response, removing the lowmid hump (could be a bad thing), and extends the lows and the highs.

The bass is increased and is alot less muddy, more solid and tight

Normally I am open to the idea that this could all be placebo, except:

I found that the bass was increased by too much. I had to EQ them down for normal use. I don't think this could happen if it's all just placebo.