Adamora
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Was just catching up on my Facebook news feed and saw this. Ouch! Is it like this across the board?
Can you tell which is which?
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PETEREK
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No it isn't like this for all manufacturers. This was likely a portable headphone though, the cables are meant to be light and flexible. It has 3 wires and a thin insulation which is what leads me to believe it's a single entry portable headphone.
Tinkerer
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Yeah. Most decent headphones have 4 conductors and jackets for the wires instead of that insulative coating. That's why they're so easy to covert to balanced. Those look like single entry portable cables or like a usb headset.
Steve Eddy
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It's single entry, but it's a full size, over-ear headphone.
I've examined a few more in the $300-$500 price range and haven't found anything different.
It's even worse than the photos would indicate. The wire used in these is a form of tinsel wire. What little actual wire that is used is wrapped around a fiber core so they look larger than they would if it was all wire.
The composite gauge of the wire used in both of these cables is 30 AWG. I examined the cable from a $300 pair of over-ear headphones the other day and it didn't even make it to that. It was 32 AWG. And the worst I've come across, not just in terms of wire gauge, but overall construction as well. That's something I would expect to be used for an earbuds cable.
The best I've found so far? A Beats cable if you can believe it. It weighed in at 26 AWG.
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Steve Eddy
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See above. And even if you're using four wires, if you can't manage to get above 30 gauge wire for a pair of full size, over-ear headphones, that's pretty sad. I use a 30 gauge solid core wire for shorting pins on mini-XLR connectors (Audeze uses 4-pin mini-XLRs with the pins shorted into two pairs for contact redundancy and reliability). It's tiny stuff. The diameter is just a hundredth of an inch.
At 30 gauge, and a 2 meter cable, that's nearly 2 ohms of resistance just for the wire itself.
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PETEREK
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check out a Beyer T1 cable sometime, or the Denon/Fostex cables, they're pretty beefy.
Steve Eddy
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But what exactly is the "beef"? Is it the wire or just a lot of rubber and braid?
I bought my niece a pair of Denon D2000s and hard wired it with my cable. I wish I could remember what was inside the stock cable and I'm pretty sure I threw it all out.
However I'm told that the Sennheiser HD-800 cable is something like 30 or 32 gauge. I'll have to scrounge around on the DIY forum.
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PETEREK
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The wire is pretty thick. I think it's 22awg for the t1 cable. "sommer cable".
Steve Eddy
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PETEREK
Member of the Trade: ThePETEREK on Etsy
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The pair I had used a Sommer Cable, it was stamped on the side of the cable. Pretty good stuff.
Steve Eddy
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Ah, ok. He didn't capitalize and I'd never heard of them before so didn't know what he was trying to say.
Thanks.
se
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