[drew.haynes]

FWIW rather than a soldering iron or clippers, I would use a Dremel cutoff wheel and sanding drum.

 

[Stealth3si]

I did this mod using lawrywild's method and had no problems.

 

[xnor]

For future reference: If you really want to do this mod I suggest to look at this thread instead: http://www.head-fi.org/forum/thread/475511/hd555-foam-mod-video

 

[pcgo]

Maybe this is a noob question (and I aplologize in advance - I'm a noob, what are ya gonna do?!) but has anyone considered (or, you know, actually *tried*) simply removing the entire grill and just leaving it out completely, rather than cutting away at it and putting it back?
 
Is there any serious downside to doing this? Any real negative frequency issues to consider?

 

[jschristian44]

if you remove the outer grill, you will be exposing the driver competely.  one bad fall and the whole thing is ruined.  that would be the main reason i would see.  i dont know why you would want to have the driver showing, i mean that would look pretty foolish to tell you the truth.  plus all that dust and stuff gets in there and within a week it's ruined.  the outer grill serves many purposes and i would leave it.

 

[Wongton]

Thanks for the detailed guide. I think I'm going to try these mods on mine!

 

[Nazo]

On the subject of fully opening the drivers, I thought I should share something. I kind of wanted to do that myself, but I was a bit concerned about the possibility of long term issues like dust actually getting inside there. So I came up with the idea to use a speaker grill cloth instead. This way it's virtually transparent to sound (and surely anything that isn't transparent is more likely to be absorbed than reflected or at least won't be reflected in a "hard" way since it's a cloth rather than something solid.) The tricky part is getting it to go in well and look decent. For now the best I could do is hot glue.

It seems to work pretty well, though I wish I had been able to pull it a bit tighter. It would protect the drivers from any normal drops short of dropping them directly onto something really pointy or something and it completely removes any possibilities of the grill affecting the sound, lol. It's certainly ugly enough though, I will admit.

I've actually had another idea only just now (when it's pretty much too late.) If you used a rotary tool with a cutter wheel, you could probably cut out most of the metal of the metal grill such that it basically just becomes a frame and then you could glue the grill cloth to the inside. It would probably be a lot easier to get it really tight this way too. It's probably too late for me to do that now since I'd have to actually remove the hot glue that's in there and I doubt I want to go to the trouble of trying (it may be possible, but a fair bit of work just to make it look better,) but something to bear in mind for anyone considering this. If you get the cloth tight enough, then it's about as safe as a solid grill anyway short of, say, dropping it directly (it would pretty much have to land right on a needle sticking up and at exactly the right spot I think.) It should also look a lot better if done correctly I suspect. You could also use a black cloth, but I only had this gray on hand (I bought some a while back for making a small semi-portable speaker, but the minimum size was a yard or so, which leaves me with quite a lot to play around with. Incidentally, speaker grill cloth makes for excellent dust filters on fans and that sort of thing as well, lol.)

Unfortunately, I don't know the HD555s well enough to say much about how this affects the sound. I partially did it as just a project for fun since they were relatively cheap (I got them on sale on Amazon for about $85 or so) and I only initially bought these headphones to have something that got along with weak portable devices (such as my NDS and my PSP -- particularly the PSP since I have a few music games on it that I actually enjoy) to be able to get away with not using an amp and still get decent sound. Turns out I actually kind of like them though so far (well, burn-in isn't 100% finished yet, but they're past the initial basic amount of burn-in required.) If the sound had been affected a lot, as long as they still sounded decent enough it would have been ok. Obviously any comments on the affects on the sound would be pointless here since I lack a proper before and after.


EDIT: I don't have a picture available atm, but I decided to actually go ahead and try that other idea. I used my rotary tool to cut ovals out of the metal grills such that they basically became nothing more than simple frames (which I cut to not extend past the plastic frame part of the headphones themselves such that there should be any effects from the metal whatsoever) and then I glued some speaker grill cloth into those frames, a bit tighter this time. The end result is something that, while it will never pass for professional by any means, actually doesn't look too ugly from a distance. The cloth is far more uniform and tighter this time, so looks nice and even. This turned out to be a lot easier than I ever expected too. The metal cuts very quickly and easily with a dremel cutter wheel. I then outlined the cutouts on the grill cloth to get close to the right size and shape and turned the permanent marker sideways to add a bit more to the outsides of the outlines such that they'd be big enough to fit in the frames. The process took a while, but went beautifully.

Actually, I'm not sure this truly is any more dangerous for the drivers than the metal grill was. Speaker grill cloth is usually wound pretty tightly to prevent thin dust particles from getting through and I think any thing that could get through it well enough to damage the driver would probably be thin and sharp enough to go through the metal and plastic grills. Frankly, I'm not convinced that there's any reason that this isn't overall a better design as it also has the side benefit of making the whole headphone a bit lighter (not that it's heavy as it is -- especially with the plastic cut out, but then lighter is never a bad thing with open headphones, right?) and it seems to me that it could even potentially be cheaper to manufacturer this way.

 

[Nazo]

I hope no one minds my bumping this, but I just wanted to show off the results of my recent work. As I said, I decided to try just cutting out parts of the metal grill and using it as a sort of frame for the grill cloth (thus eliminating any reflections that must surely result from the metal and I suppose maybe some potential for distortions since the grill might still have been able to vibrate some?) There is still the issue of the fact that it has some ugly hot glue actually gluing the cloth into the "frame" but otherwise I think it actually looks surprisingly close to something professional:


BTW, I'm rather curious about something. Has anyone compared the soundstage modded HD555/HD595 to the newer HD598s? I find it interesting that most of what people are saying about the HD598s versus the HD595 sounds quite a lot like the very things that this soundstage mod actually affects. After googling around a bit to try to find pictures of the inside of an HD598, I noticed that it has only a minimal amount of plastic under the metal grill -- basically just enough to maintain full structural integrity. This really makes me curious. Is there any chance that the HD598 really is mostly just a better cased HD595? More importantly, if you do this mod, are you maybe just maybe, effectively turning an HD555/HD595 into an HD598 -- or at least something so close as to be effectively the same thing insofar as the value of the cost of buying the HD555 and modifying it? Well, not that I ever bought this HD555 for any reason like that (I just bought it on a whim because it was dirt cheap on sale and I wanted to try them out for their potential to work far better on weak devices like my handheld game systems and PMPs and because I was curious as to how the Sennheiser sound might suit me or otherwise fail to do so. I don't think a whim has ever panned out quite so well for me before...) It makes me very curious though as to how close these two maybe become with this modification.

 

[FearSC549]

Quote:

I hope no one minds my bumping this, but I just wanted to show off the results of my recent work. As I said, I decided to try just cutting out parts of the metal grill and using it as a sort of frame for the grill cloth (thus eliminating any reflections that must surely result from the metal and I suppose maybe some potential for distortions since the grill might still have been able to vibrate some?) There is still the issue of the fact that it has some ugly hot glue actually gluing the cloth into the "frame" but otherwise I think it actually looks surprisingly close to something professional:

BTW, I'm rather curious about something. Has anyone compared the soundstage modded HD555/HD595 to the newer HD598s? I find it interesting that most of what people are saying about the HD598s versus the HD595 sounds quite a lot like the very things that this soundstage mod actually affects. After googling around a bit to try to find pictures of the inside of an HD598, I noticed that it has only a minimal amount of plastic under the metal grill -- basically just enough to maintain full structural integrity. This really makes me curious. Is there any chance that the HD598 really is mostly just a better cased HD595? More importantly, if you do this mod, are you maybe just maybe, effectively turning an HD555/HD595 into an HD598 -- or at least something so close as to be effectively the same thing insofar as the value of the cost of buying the HD555 and modifying it? Well, not that I ever bought this HD555 for any reason like that (I just bought it on a whim because it was dirt cheap on sale and I wanted to try them out for their potential to work far better on weak devices like my handheld game systems and PMPs and because I was curious as to how the Sennheiser sound might suit me or otherwise fail to do so. I don't think a whim has ever panned out quite so well for me before...) It makes me very curious though as to how close these two maybe become with this modification.

Nope, modded 555 will never sound like the 598. They have different drivers.
 
Also, 558 modded =/= 598. That goes the same for modded 555 =/= 595. They have different clamping force.
 

 

[Nazo]

Well, no doubt that has some effect on how they sound, but I wonder how much once broken in? After all, once you've broken them in, the clamping force should be less extremely different. (Or are there other things like the shape of the earpads?) I would never say that my HD555s were exactly the same thing as HD595s (heck, if nothing else there are different build qualities to the casing and such according to what people are saying) but it seems to me like if you remove the "surround reflector" foam you at least have something so close that it's pointless to spend the extra on the HD595s for most of us (not everyone -- even when a difference is less than 1%, someone will spend a huge amount to get it, lol -- just a good number of people.) Or do they really end up being that different even after being fully broken in?

Anyway, on the soundstage modified HD555/HD595 versus HD598, I knew they had different drivers, but I guess my real question here is: how different are these two generations really if you do this mod? Some of the stuff people are saying about the HD598 versus the HD595 sounds a lot like the stuff that this mod actually changes (for better or for worse.) And sorry, I didn't really word that right. I realize they have different drivers (if nothing else I can see a very different shape on the frequency response curves on graphs like that of HeadRoom's "build-a-graph" section.) I'm just asking: might this effectively upgrade an HD555/HD595 to being, let's say 90% of the good things of an HD598? It seems like the better soundstage in particular was one of the biggest things people kept saying about it and, if anything, this is probably even better still if we assume the drivers are at least this similar (since they have more plastic reflecting the sound than we end up with this mod.)

 

[FearSC549]

Quote:

Well, no doubt that has some effect on how they sound, but I wonder how much once broken in? After all, once you've broken them in, the clamping force should be less extremely different. (Or are there other things like the shape of the earpads?) I would never say that my HD555s were exactly the same thing as HD595s (heck, if nothing else there are different build qualities to the casing and such according to what people are saying) but it seems to me like if you remove the "surround reflector" foam you at least have something so close that it's pointless to spend the extra on the HD595s for most of us (not everyone -- even when a difference is less than 1%, someone will spend a huge amount to get it, lol -- just a good number of people.) Or do they really end up being that different even after being fully broken in?
Anyway, on the soundstage modified HD555/HD595 versus HD598, I knew they had different drivers, but I guess my real question here is: how different are these two generations really if you do this mod? Some of the stuff people are saying about the HD598 versus the HD595 sounds a lot like the stuff that this mod actually changes (for better or for worse.) And sorry, I didn't really word that right. I realize they have different drivers (if nothing else I can see a very different shape on the frequency response curves on graphs like that of HeadRoom's "build-a-graph" section.) I'm just asking: might this effectively upgrade an HD555/HD595 to being, let's say 90% of the good things of an HD598? It seems like the better soundstage in particular was one of the biggest things people kept saying about it and, if anything, this is probably even better still if we assume the drivers are at least this similar (since they have more plastic reflecting the sound than we end up with this mod.)

IMO, no grill(I mean no cloth and no metal grill) HD 595 sounds pretty damn good; I made one of my 595 like that for testing purposes. However, to my ears, the 598 sounds more refined. Value-wise, the 595(not 555) with no grill at all, is the best value compared to 555, 558, 595, 598. Removing the grill on the 558 and 598 turns it into a muddy bass monster(sounds like ****).

 

[Nazo]

Hmm, grill cloth should be pretty close to transparent. As it's a soft cloth instead of hard plastic or metal grill, it seems to me that any frequencies it really responds to it should absorb rather than reflect (and given that we're talking about the backs of the drivers, the purpose of open is to prevent any of that.) Plus these things are generally made to go in front of speakers where even a subtle effect could be noticeable so are designed to let the sound and air through pretty much unhindered mostly just preventing dust and hopefully anything from actually damaging the drivers during a drop or bump. I suspect that the plastic and metal on the other hand are being used by Sennheiser more to increase structural integrity than anything else. Some people can be pretty rough on their headphones and they probably like to aim for a stronger build. It is true that if you make a habit of directly dropping headphones onto a hard surface, they will be weaker without the plastic grill and weaker still without the metal grill (that cloth is going to do absolutely nothing whatsoever to protect.) Of course, anything hard will have reflections and harmonics to deal with, so there's the catch, but then it's no use explaining to people that a seemingly overly fragile headphone is only so fragile because they had people's best interests in mind, lol. In the end, it just wouldn't have sold as well.

I'm inclined to agree with the earlier poster than no grill of any sort at all is probably a bad idea though. If nothing else, dust buildup is likely to affect the sound over a long enough period of time. There's not even a cloth covering that main hole in the drivers, so dust could actually get into the drivers themselves directly, not just through outer edges or something. I'm not convinced that they are really all that vulnerable to drops, but I can see having nothing on there at all as being at least a tiny bit more dangerous as things can get in there. In particular, those drivers are strong enough magnets that anything small and metal gets in there pretty easily (as some people have found out the hard way when taking the screws out and those screws falling right into the driver...) Even if it didn't get into the driver, that means some careful maneuvering with some very small hemostats and fighting the pull of the magnet while doing so (I seriously doubt a hunk of metal like a screw or something sitting inside that hole would have positive benefits to the sound...) Thus, even if a softer cloth can still affect the sound, it's probably better to stick with it than nothing at all for any sort of long term use unless they will be staying at all times in a positive pressure scientific facility or something...

And I'm still curious. Just how different does the HD555 really sound compared to the HD595? Is it really worth the huge price difference since removing the foam alone (which I doubt anyone with a semi-steady hand and a screwdriver could mess up) does make it ridiculously close to the HD595 at least? Better "value" means a better bang for the buck product which means the tiny differences in design between the two would have to have a > 2x difference to be worth the > 2x price difference for it to be a better value... Similarly, if the HD598 sounds better, given their similarity in prices in most markets with the HD598 actually costing less in many cases, the HD595 can't be of a better value there either. Value doesn't mean highest quality or whatever, just higher quality per dollar (or whatever local currency) spent (which is why I think either the HD555 or HD558 are probably going to be the highest value since they can each be modified to be extremely close to the quality of their bigger brothers.)


I'm still wondering most importantly though, how does the HD555 and/or HD595 compare to the HD598 when you've done this soundstage mod with all the generally positive effects this has on their sound? The HD598 will probably always remain better, but by how much?

 

[jschristian44]

The modded T50RP is easily 20x better than the HD595 and they only cost $75 new.  I am making wooden cups for mine and am willing to make a few for people interested.  Just PM me.  But the soundstaged modded HD555 would sound better than the HD595 for sure in almost every way.  The modded T50RP I do, sound similar to the HD800 and have better bass than the D2000.

 

[Nazo]

Er, I had to look those up (I have to admit I'm not particularly familiar with this Fostex and can't seem to find much by way of mention of them in hi-fi circles) but the impression I get is that these absolutely can't be compared. Especially if you think the bass is better than the D2000 (which in turns has a very different bass compared to the HD555/HD595.) It sounds like these have far too different sound signatures to say that one is necessarily "better" than the other (much less by such an extreme amount.) Rather, they are better for yourself and presumably a number of others, but not for everyone. Just for instance, I suspect I'd hate them because of that high frequency "sparkle" in the HD800 that you say these sound so much like that is one of the reasons I'm now selling my D2000s to switch to my heavily modded HD555s. To me the HD555s have a far better sound (at least modded and burned in -- I can't speak to stock) compared to my D2000s. For a lot of people I'd be willing to bet the exact opposite is true. A term like "better" can only be used when things at least have a very similar sound signature (such as HD598 versus HD595 for instance.)

 

[jschristian44]

This is true to a point.  I had a fully modded HD555 with everything done to it and it was my favorite phone for a while.  The bass was lacking though.  The mids/highs were very clear though so that's why I liked it.  I then got an AD700 and it immediately became my favorite phone because it was more comfortable and way more detailed.  Of course the bass was completely gone, but I was FPS gaming so it didn't matter that much.  But nowadays, they have much better gaming sets out there for the price.  I still don't think the AD700 soundstage can be beat though, it's very impressive.  But, the HD555 was a very nice all around headset modded that I can still recommend to anyone on a budget.  But after hearing these wooden T50RP, they are an absolute steal for the price after modded.  Much much better all around in my eyes in anything near the price.  The mids can't be beat.  They also don't sparkle at all like the HD800 is known for.  It's more of a mix between the AD700 and HD555 in terms of that because it's not bright neither dark after a re-cable.  Basically it's like this years modded HD555 and the modded HD555 is like 5 years ago technology.  If you look at computers 5 years ago compare their technology with todays.  That's basically what it is.  So that's why I recommend them to people now.  That's just my opinion.