Help with headphone internal rewiring confusion? (56k: Fugeta bout it...)

[TopPop]

Hi y'all,

I was wondering if you guys could give me some quick help on a rewiring question.

I just bought some vintage Pioneer SE-405 phones off a guy in town for $15. Great condition, with original box/manual. The sound quality isn't amazing... but these are some seriously comfortable and fun headphones!

I want to bypass the volume pots, though. 1) I can't get rid of the crackling by turning them over and over, and 2) I'm sure the sound quality is hindered by these!

However, I'm having some trouble understanding how to rewire them.

Here's a picture of the left channel:

These headphones are a single-sided wire design, so this is the side which has the cord coming into it. The red, white, and black wires on the bottom are the wires from the external cord. The red, blue, and black wires on the left are going to the volume pot.

Here is the volume pot for the left channel:

A clearer picture of the wiring for the left channel:

The red and black wires toward the top left lead to the right channel.

Here is a pic for the wiring of the right channel:

The red wires toward the top left are just spliced together. Not connected to anything else.

Here is the volume pot for the right channel:

I may be wrong here, but how I was imagining rewiring these would end up in a serial wiring... hmmm... it's been a while since I've done wiring stuff, and I'm getting a bit confused.

Help?

Also, I had a question about the driver coverings. Here's a pic:

These seem to block an awful lot of the driver area. Can't be good, right? Would y'all recommend modding these? I would just cut out the plastic in the ring created by the outer holes, and stretch cloth over the plastic to keep dust/hair out. Thoughts?

I really want to get these sounding as good as they can, because they are really fun!!

 

[TopPop]

I think I'm going to go ahead and do a full recable job, but I need to figure out the wiring path... which I think I've done after looking over the pics again! By the way, I don't own a multimeter, so I kind of have to do it this way...

Pic 3: black stays on the right post (negative), white goes where the blue is (positive)

Pic 4: black stays on the negative post, red goes where the blue is (positive)

Does this seem about right?

 

[TopPop]

Gonna hold off on the complete recable for right now, but I did rewire the Pioneer Se-405's, bypassing the volume pots. I also removed the cover on the driver.

You know... these things aren't half bad now... Not gonna lie: they won't outperform many of the newer headphones. Rolled off highs and lows, but the stuff in between sounds much, much better than I had expected! Good midrange punch: great for drums, especially. These are a quite more-than-decent set of cheap headphones!

These things can be had for super cheap, so if you can pick up a pair, they're really fun, and I'd imagine could be modded quite a bit.

Fun stuff!