I haven't posted much yet, but this came along so time to do more than lurk!
First off, this is supposed to be a sub-$50 project, so apologies in advance if I seem to be doing everything wrong! I was at a Goodwill store one day, when I spotted some headphones that looked like they would be nice to wear. With no other reason than that, I bought them. Only $3, I'm off to a good start! They are made by Sound Design, model 337 and appear to have spent a lot of time in good storage, but also with a lot of use.
The cord was broken in six places, so what's pictured is with a $2 6 foot headphone extension cable wired in. These 337's have individual volume controls, the black pucks at the center of each housing. The potentiometers have absolutely no dead spots and I think I'll leave them in circuit. But because the knobs are coming loose, I've temporarily wrapped some electrical tape around them at full volume. They also have on/off switches if you rotate the volume all the way down, which is a funky kind of coolness. A resistor is soldered onto one terminal of each pot to keep the load balanced at any position. The cable that crosses over was still good, but I'll probably replace that whenever I find a decent replacement. The top cushion unsnaps and removing four small screws will enable the entire assembly to pull apart. The whole thing tears apart really easy. With the exception of the housings, which had the screw holes melted into place. It looks like the original method of assembly and this is where the story begins to take a bit of a downward trend.
After cutting the melted holes and soldering in the new cable, I found that the drivers seem to work just fine but these headphones sound really bad! And keep in mind I have never had a good rig to compare against, so maybe these are the most unholy-sounding phones ever? But they fit so nice....
So to continue, just a week previously I happened to notice while at a friends place, one of his kids had tossed a set of skull-candy headphones in the garbage because the band broke. I salvaged the drivers and stashed them in an envelope. Now I think I might try installing those into these 337's.
But first I think I need to solve a basic problem. The issue is that the main portion of the housings are a thin hard white plastic, and have some unfriendly characteristics: not much blocking of outside noise for what appears to be a sealed housing, touching the housing makes a very audible noise while in use, where the spring-steel frame pivots makes all kinds of creaking noises, the housings have a quality much like a bare concrete cell - like I can close my eyes with these on and I can really picture that first day in the new house as a teenager when my dad says 'and this will be your room...when it's finished'
Ok, so my first idea is to coat the inside of each housing with some RTV silicone, about 1/8th inch thick. But I also could use a poly-urethane sealer which is heavier. But the urethane takes forever to cure. I'm also considering using my hot-glue gun to attach several ounces of fishing weights inside of each housing. I think the heavier I make it, the better.
For the creaky head-motion, I could try adding a tiny bit of Power Punch lube to the pivots, but that stuff is really sticky and might attract too much dust. I might add some fiber wadding for damping depending on what happens. I'm also thinking the skullcandy drivers might be temporary. I like the idea of using some tweeters, and eventually I ought to get some kind of dedicated headphone amp. I'm already noticing some digital weirdness plugging into the jack on my computer, and the SPDIF-connected surround sound amp is adding noise to it's headphone output.
