AstarOfDavid
New Head-Fier
Hello,
FIRSLY I am very skilled with all electronics, I repair TV's, Motherboards, Videocards, Speakers (including refoaming & reconing), headphones, wires etc... and when it comes to this topic I've been making custom cables since I was a kid. With that said:
I've made a custom balanced headphone jack/wire to work on my SOL Republic Master Tracks X3's, (because I have about 5 pairs) and I do like their sound when properly EQ adjusted, and supplied nice clean power to, they sound better than all of the other headphones I've tested (at least for pounding tunes - not for sounding perfect - but for trance on the go these are the ones to go with). I had purchased a pair of SOL Master Tracks X3's and I really liked their loudness/thump they really pound on a good headphone amp. So I picked up a pair of SOL Master Tracks XC (Tuned by Calvin Haris)... I was a bit disapointed as he had them take all the thump/pound out.
So I decided I'd like a backup pair of the X3's and found on Ebay a "cheap deal" on these claiming they were new... and the price was so good I picked up a few. When they arrived I noticed right away none of the pairs "matched" one side was louder than the other another one had more bass and the other had no bass. Returning them was out of the question as they came from the UK and the cost wasn't worth it.
What I did with them was I took all the L/R speakers off and set them up with color stickers, and tested which speaker sounded the closest to another. I eventually came up with matches.
1 Pair in particular sounded perfeclty matched.... so I took these and hooked them up to my custom balanced cable, and suddenly the perfect matched pair was totally missmatched. So I took the quieter less bassy sounding one off and took all of the other speakers and tested them against the better sounding speaker (on my balanced cable) and.... I found a perfect match (which was not the original match). This was great! But then when I plugged this balanced match into the regular stereo cable - they were a total missmatched (again one side much louder than the other).
The pinouts used came from the manufacuter of my headphone amp. I also tested them with my multi-meter to make sure each wire is wired correctly, and also tested for shorts. The cable is fine. These SOL X3's use a 2.5mm jack on each speaker/cup... I assume the tip is positive and the base is negative. And I wired them up this way.
As I said I also have a pair of SOL XC's which I made the same cable for them (but I opened these up to directly solder the wires onto the speakers) and they sound perfecly matched. I'd do the same with the X3's but to open them you have to tear/poke 4 holes in the speaker fabric cover to get at the screws. I also like being able to swap back to the original cable if needing stereo. So using the cap/jacks seemed like a good idea.... but this is where I think the issue might be, I've opened my 1st two pairs and the speakers inside are not marked for polarity....
This leads me to suspect the issue I am having is that the factory actually just randomly solders the polarity to the speakers (since there is no markings)??
I've heard a lot of rumours about SOL Republic being a "bad brand"... and perhaps the problem was/is quality assurance?
Since there is no "positive/negative" markings, then when they solder the wires in at the factory perhaps they are doing so at random?
Anyone hear of similar stories of incorrectly wired headphones from the factory?
(I'm tempted to open them to look - but it might just be easier to reverse the wires at the earphone jack input)
FIRSLY I am very skilled with all electronics, I repair TV's, Motherboards, Videocards, Speakers (including refoaming & reconing), headphones, wires etc... and when it comes to this topic I've been making custom cables since I was a kid. With that said:
I've made a custom balanced headphone jack/wire to work on my SOL Republic Master Tracks X3's, (because I have about 5 pairs) and I do like their sound when properly EQ adjusted, and supplied nice clean power to, they sound better than all of the other headphones I've tested (at least for pounding tunes - not for sounding perfect - but for trance on the go these are the ones to go with). I had purchased a pair of SOL Master Tracks X3's and I really liked their loudness/thump they really pound on a good headphone amp. So I picked up a pair of SOL Master Tracks XC (Tuned by Calvin Haris)... I was a bit disapointed as he had them take all the thump/pound out.
So I decided I'd like a backup pair of the X3's and found on Ebay a "cheap deal" on these claiming they were new... and the price was so good I picked up a few. When they arrived I noticed right away none of the pairs "matched" one side was louder than the other another one had more bass and the other had no bass. Returning them was out of the question as they came from the UK and the cost wasn't worth it.
What I did with them was I took all the L/R speakers off and set them up with color stickers, and tested which speaker sounded the closest to another. I eventually came up with matches.
1 Pair in particular sounded perfeclty matched.... so I took these and hooked them up to my custom balanced cable, and suddenly the perfect matched pair was totally missmatched. So I took the quieter less bassy sounding one off and took all of the other speakers and tested them against the better sounding speaker (on my balanced cable) and.... I found a perfect match (which was not the original match). This was great! But then when I plugged this balanced match into the regular stereo cable - they were a total missmatched (again one side much louder than the other).
The pinouts used came from the manufacuter of my headphone amp. I also tested them with my multi-meter to make sure each wire is wired correctly, and also tested for shorts. The cable is fine. These SOL X3's use a 2.5mm jack on each speaker/cup... I assume the tip is positive and the base is negative. And I wired them up this way.
As I said I also have a pair of SOL XC's which I made the same cable for them (but I opened these up to directly solder the wires onto the speakers) and they sound perfecly matched. I'd do the same with the X3's but to open them you have to tear/poke 4 holes in the speaker fabric cover to get at the screws. I also like being able to swap back to the original cable if needing stereo. So using the cap/jacks seemed like a good idea.... but this is where I think the issue might be, I've opened my 1st two pairs and the speakers inside are not marked for polarity....
This leads me to suspect the issue I am having is that the factory actually just randomly solders the polarity to the speakers (since there is no markings)??
I've heard a lot of rumours about SOL Republic being a "bad brand"... and perhaps the problem was/is quality assurance?
Since there is no "positive/negative" markings, then when they solder the wires in at the factory perhaps they are doing so at random?
Anyone hear of similar stories of incorrectly wired headphones from the factory?
(I'm tempted to open them to look - but it might just be easier to reverse the wires at the earphone jack input)
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