Eternalmetal
Head-Fier
- Joined
- Nov 11, 2008
- Posts
- 57
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- 11
If you have a fine-tipped soldering iron and a steady hand, you should go for itIt's not that hard, and even if you make a mistake, you can just grab your solder-remover and start again. Yes you definitely need to add the resistors yourself, because these plugs come with nothing but the pins, pcb and plastic shell. You'll need 27 ohm resistors for the P model or 102 ohm for S. If you're off by an ohm or two, it's no big deal (it will be easier to find 100 ohm resistors!), but you need to match them for the left and right drivers, to make sure you get the same frequency response from both. You can do this by buying a huge pile of resistors and testing them all with a good multi-meter to find a nice matching pair, or (my preference) is to just buy some good quality low tolerance TFT resistors, which already come with the exact same resistance and are tiny enough to fit in the plug housing.
Thanks for the information! Ill need to find some good resistors, any good places online?
As for cables, I'm a fan of anything that reduces microphonics or adds functionality (I know some see this as sacrelige, but I like to use my ER4's with my iPhone and really need a remote!). For either of those two reasons, it's totally worth it. However - and I'm not wanting to get into a flame war here - IMHO, if you're only looking to 'upgrade' your cable by soldering on those highest-purity silver/unobtanium cables, you're wasting your time and money. Any cable that gives you the necessary impedance will do the trick. Of course, the FR will change if the cable impedance changes. You might even prefer that change, but it isn't magical, it isn't what the manufacturer intended and it isn't something you couldn't have achieved via a simple EQ. (Check out the Pencil EQ in the 'Can Opener' app for iPhone - it also works with external DACs. It's awesome!) I suspect slight changes in impedance have convinced some people that those $800 cables on Amazon and eBay are worth the money. Unless somebody shows you some newly-discovered electro-magnetic-gravitational-relativistic physical property of cables that we didn't previously know about, I'd view such cable 'upgrades' as very expensive jars of snakeoil
The ER4 is meant to be a studio monitor stock, so I dont doubt that their cable is of a more than sufficient quality. My gripe with the microphonics are merely secondary to the extra long cable that I need to fold up and stuff in my pocket, or the constant need for the P to S adapter. I liked the feel of the cable I had on my W4 a whole lot more, and thought it would be interesting to try and make the ER4 feel similar. Im not so sure about overly expensive cables myself, but im certainly not going to buy the cheapest thing I can find either. Im not intending on doing this for audiophile reasons, as I cant imagine why I would want the ER4 to sound any different (unlike my AKGs).
I am having good results with the rockbox EQ on my iPod classic, and am really surprised at how well the ER4 accepts the changes without distortion. The stock iPod always sounded muddy to me, but whatever processing the rockbox flash got rid of makes it a pretty good portable device. I was planning on getting an external DAC, but I really dont think it would make much of a difference to justify the extra bulk. I already dont use my smart phone.
:mad:
