Suspending a driver will inherently be more problematic than a microphone; as the driver is actively generating it's own movement, while a microphone is passive. There will also be a factor or more difference in the energy the driver is converting to movement compared to the what the microphone is receiving.
In the ZMF video IvanDrago linked to; it shows damping around the sides of the driver, but not in front of or behind. I'm assuming that it is not advised to dampen any of the driver's forward and back motion, even a little bit.
This is definitely worth testing though as these are just assumptions.
akatsuki I'm afraid I don't understand how your suspended driver design goes together. I must be missing something.
Question to all: How much time do you spend before getting the measurements right, the right 3D model, and right prints?
I look at @Tofty's last design and even though a bunch of things come from previous projects, I imagine that I might need ... IDK.. a good month, maybe more depending on how many things I needed to take into account but didn't until the 9 hours print was done and didn't fit.
For the above design it must have taken me over a month on and off to get the design to a point where it was ready to print, although this was probably my most technically complex design due to all the parts that needed to be accommodated, plus all the wiring paths.
I have a decent amount of experience with the results of my printer, so I could make the dimensional adjustments needed at the design stage ( mostly just adding 0.5mm clearance around any parts I needed to integrate).
Accurately modelling the parts being used really helps with being confident that it will all go together during assembly. With this project I was fortunate that other people had already created useable models for some of the switches, the MP3 Player and battery charging PCBs, saving considerable time.
Unless the part came out completely unusable; I tend to use it even if it looks a bit rough. The nice thing about printed parts is you can easily take a knife to it and reshape areas that require a little fettling. I used to print lots of parts all in one go but I've moved to printing the larger parts individually. so each part takes a few hours at most and can be worked on as the next part prints. Also, as headphones consist of largely mirrored parts; I try and print one side completely before the other, so that if I identify something that needs to change, I only scrap one side, rather than both. A number of my headphones have different earcups on either side as I thought of an improvement when building up the first side but it wasn't such a big deal to need to scrap it.
Broadly this latest project owes more then may be readily apparent to my previous work and the work of others, as there's a load of things that I didn't do, because of having tried them previously. It's all just iteration to an end goal never reached, because I'm only pretending to know what I'm doing.
Annoyingly I ordered the wrong tap for the 12mm switches (they're 0.75mm pitch not 0.5mm. The HRS connectors are 0.5mm which is where I think I misremembered), so I can't yet install them. However the rest of it is done externally and I'm pretty happy with the results. The arms are less flimsy than I had feared they would be, so no need to rework that. The headband is a little light on the clamping force, but just the right side of useable. The battery is a bit tight and hard to remove, but there should be no need to regularly remove it, due to the built in charger. The bridge cable connectors work nicely and were easier to wire up than I had feared. While I'm not super sold on the wood filament, it's fine for what it is and has quite a nice texture. I think it worked best for the stand, rather than the headphones themselves.
Doing all the internal wiring is going to be challenging, but I hope to be finished by next weekend.