[Groove]

Hey guys, I can't believe I'm asking help repairing a cable, but for the life of me I can't figure what's wrong.
So today I found out my cable insulation cracked, don't really know how that happened, just took it out of the box and it was like that, oh well. The insulation was cracked pretty badly and some of the cable was showing through, I figured I just put a little electrical tape on it and seal the deal. However, afterwards I noticed the sound began disappearing from the damaged side. Well, I figured maybe some of the leftover original insulation is smashing into the cable and maybe creating problems that way. So I removed the electrical tape and removed/cut the previous (damaged) insulation underneath it, and saw that the cable is covered in some sort of green paste/paint, I assumed it must be another kind of insulation and didn't put anymore mind into it, and just taped the cable again around the damaged section. Then when I plugged the headphones in, the damaged side almost completely stopped working, I can twist it around to make it work, but if I just let it hang it's dead.
What's going on? Should I clean the green paste? Is the cable damaged? (Oh and here I should point out that the cable itself looks completely intact). Any help is appreciated.
 

 
 
 


 
edit: I just thought of something... that green stuff, that wouldn't be... corrosion, would it? I'm an idiot. I'll try to clean it tomorrow and see if that helps.

 

[stayfrosty]

possibly the sound cutting is from the 2 wires shorting out.. not ideal but would definately fix it is is to cut that part out strip a bit and soldier the 2 ends together and put some shrink wrap over it

 

[g3ne01]

How has the repair been going? I have the same frayed section on my HD 800s. I just used electrical tape. Luckily, my sound never degraded as far as I know.

 

[buggalugs]

I had exactly the same problem. After just over a year of careful use mine frayed just as in your pictures. Every time I repaired it the cable would split further and further from the repair.
I got so hacked off with it I bought a cheap after market cable off Ebay and slung the Sennheisers.
Oh! and the cost of an official Senn replacement cable here in the UK is £162; I always knew I was in the wrong job!   
I believe this is not a rare fault BTW. 

 

[g3ne01]

  I had exactly the same problem. After just over a year of careful use mine frayed just as in your pictures. Every time I repaired it the cable would split further and further from the repair.
I got so hacked off with it I bought a cheap after market cable off Ebay and slung the Sennheisers.
Oh! and the cost of an official Senn replacement cable here in the UK is £162; I always knew I was in the wrong job!   
I believe this is not a rare fault BTW. 

How did you repair? I am considering using heat shrink....maybe liquid electrical tape and heat shrink.

 

[buggalugs]

Yeah I did exactly what you propose doing.
It looked nice and neat and worked for a week or so, but then the cable covering split from the repair for another inch or so. I cannot work out why this should have happened; the outer sheath covering of the cable ended up splitting from the Y piece to nearly the capsule.
Clearly there must be quality control issues here 'cos these cables had been treated with kid gloves. For a flagship headphone it's a pretty poor showing - enough to put me off ever buying Sennheiser gear again, even though the SQ is outstanding.

 

[g3ne01]

  Yeah I did exactly what you propose doing.
It looked nice and neat and worked for a week or so, but then the cable covering split from the repair for another inch or so. I cannot work out why this should have happened; the outer sheath covering of the cable ended up splitting from the Y piece to nearly the capsule.
Clearly there must be quality control issues here 'cos these cables had been treated with kid gloves. For a flagship headphone it's a pretty poor showing - enough to put me off ever buying Sennheiser gear again, even though the SQ is outstanding.

I have been speculating that the weight of the heavier portion of the cable causes twisting on the upper section which splits it. I want to heat shrink the whole upper section on both sides. I might add liquid tape underneath...maybe over the heat shrink. What order did you do it?

 

[gipsy]

3M may help..

 

[buggalugs]

Hiya G3
My method of repair was to carefully remove the frayed outer sheathing back to the split and razor it off neatly. I then filled this void with a piece of insulation taken from some other cable I had laying around. Then I used some 4x shrinkable heatshrinking to cover this (split lengthwise as a wrap and then very carefully glued into an effective tube with super glue). After shrinking this wrap the whole affair looked remarkably neat, without any major lumps or bumps - quite professional in fact.
Damn me if the original sheathing didn't carry on splitting a week or so after all this palaver.
Being thoroughly hacked off with all this, I was able to purchase a very nice after market silver plated conductor (woven) cable from China for about £40. This cable is about 1/2 the length of the original so therefore much more manageable and is also rather more robust. There has been absolutely no deterioration of SQ with this cable. Most of the stuff about specialist cables that people enthuse about is of course nonsense (I Iearned Ohm's law when I was about 6!).
Rather unfortunately this Chinese vendor seems to have disappeared so I cannot provide a link.
Good luck with your repair.

 

[Javad]

This is completely outrageous. I noticed so many cracks on my original HD800 cable today just like what you posted in the pictures. didn't do anything. How this happened to the cable.