the Nichicon KW caps finally arrived, they each cost $0.60 Singapore cents ($0.46USD according to XE.com) each so it was really cheap to do replace the current Jovial caps:
I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to get the PCB out of the chassis, perhaps someone could enlighten me because I took out the screws at the top near the SD card slot including the one under the sticker but I was unable to pry it out.. felt like I was going to break something if I used more force but it still wouldn't budge. I cut off the legs from the current Jovial caps and soldered the Nichicon ones directly onto the old stumps.. a really ugly
but functional job and it was the best I could do without access to the lower side.
if you're going to do this, you have to make sure the caps are all flat against the PCB otherwise the back case wouldn't fit back on..there is about 1 or 2mm of tolerance to work with. (capacitors are 6.3mm wide x 11mm tall)
all that bit of trouble was worth it in the end, because I always suspected my current unit had a channel imbalance in which the right channel was stronger in certain frequencies than the left. I could confirm this by simply flipping my HD-25s around and the left channel (previously right) would be stronger sounding. This immediately disappeared after this capacitor mod, perhaps one of the Jovials on the left channel went bad? I'm listening to "Get Lucky" as I'm typing this and it feels like the left channel is unnaturally loud probably only because I got so used to the left channel being somewhat muted.. awesome!
I can't say whether there is any difference in quality of the audio... I'm not one to go into such intricate details about such things, but the fact that it fixed my channel imbalance made my day!
10/10 would replace caps again (if I think they go bad)!