Trae
500+ Head-Fier
Here are the details:
SB Acoustics 2.5" full range speakers
Oak used for baffle
Dremeled a slot around the wood to slip the pads on (the ultra rare beyerdynamic gel earpads)
Tac used to seal the perimeter of the speakers
16AWG 4 conductor speaker wire with 25ohm resistors going through all of them
female quick-disconnect terminals to connect to the speakers
banana plugs to connect to the mini-x A100
SMSL M8 DAC
little nails for the headband to rest on
m3 screws and nuts used to secure everything
a series of equalizers to make these audible and to L/R balance them
headband from a pair of safety earmuffs
Now, to go into the technicalities, I chose these speakers because their specs and construction looked really good, and 2.5" was the perfect size for my earpads. I am using 25ohm resistors through all +/- wires only to reduce the hiss and slight 60 cycle ground loop that was present without them. The amp has plenty of power, so being able to remove the noise (well, attenuate to inaudible levels) and still have more than enough volume was what the resistors gave me. Screws and nuts were used to keep everything easy to (dis)assemble and modular, though I did do a pretty bad job drilling the holes. Oh well. It works.
To describe the sound of these, uh, headspeakers in a simple way, imagine a pair of HD800s (the last regular headphones that I've listened to), but with a really warm and smooth sound signature. Really warm. Then add more soundstage width, less depth (almost like the width took away from the depth and rounded it out), make the mids more forward and the treble sharper, but not peaky. Then the bass...let's see. Thanks to the amp, these can hit hard enough to rupture your eardrums. Even still, the bass is the cleanest that I've ever heard with eerie separation. Definitely planar quality bass.
So yeah, I definitely colored them with my EQ configurations (red-orange?), but I believe I have created the headphones that I have always wanted to have. All of the headphones that I have listened to all had something that I didn't like about them, and modifying them was simply a temporary placeholder until I messed with another pair in an attempt to make my ideal headphones.
What got me into using speakers instead of regular headphone drivers was I had an old bose 5.1 system with those tiny cube speakers. I took out the speakers and duct taped them directly to the back of the earpads, and whoa. That was it. Previously, I was messing around with transplanting drivers and modifying headphone frames to my liking, but this...this was an eye opener of how good headphones could sound. Even though they weren't all that great initially, I saw the potential in using what is essentially a massively overbuilt headphone driver. After a few months of messing around, I finally made headspeakers out of them, but I wanted more, and here we are roughly two years later. I'm obviously skipping a lot of stuff in-between, but needless to say, there were hundreds of hours of trial and error to get to what is now my ultimate headphones...until I start messing around some more.
