[LazyH]

Hello world!!!
 
I'm currently in the process of modding a Rocketfish gaming headset as a gift for a friend of mine. I was questioning the sound quality of a  hardware store gaming headset but at a 75% discount I figured it would be a nice to see the possibilities, and I was pretty well surprised, they have a clarity and depth that were hard to find in most of my other headphones in that price range ($5-25 at discount price) along with pretty darn good comfort with soft flexible fabric earpads and headband. so i got to work taking them apart and found a think layer of foam material between the driver and the ear, I removed this on one side and a/b'd with the other side, without the foamthere was even more clarity and separation but the headphones sounded a bit brighter, possibly too bright for my friends tastes, with the foam, though, colored the sound way too much to consider it worth leaving alone. a few other mods, sound absorbing in the cups and discount store "breathable tape" on the driver holes improved the sound even more but it's still a bit too bright. I tried a few materials (felt, foam, fabric, paper, paper tape, etc) where the old foam was to try to tone down the high end a bit but nothing works without coloring/distorting far more that improving the sound. If anyone has any ideas for materials that would help reduce treble without messing with the sound quality I would greatly appreciate their input. (sorry for the long post)
 
Lazy H

 

[nikongod]

They are $10 headphones, accept that there will be compromises even after you modify them least you drive yourself insane. 
 
Once you have done that it is very easy to say "well, I have done my best, and they are better than before for what you want to do with them."
 
Are they Koss Portapros by any chance? 

 

[LazyH]

Modding is my greatest addiction. I'll keep going for months until I get that perfect sound, same with everything I own, cars, computers, kitchen knives, everything's either modded like he11 or homemade, and I've been able to learn so much from doing that, I can forge a knife strong enough to chop through a 2x4 several times and still be razor blade sharp, it's just part of who I am I guess. It's a rocketfish gaming headset, it was originally priced $55-65ish but the discount took it down to $20's. Something else I'm considering is making a spacer to increse the size of the chamber behind the driver to bring out the low end a bit more, as well as using some sound absorbing material in the cups to avoid losing that clarity and treble "punch", kind of like the stratoKOSSters in those grado cups, these have some of the most "real" sounding impact on drums and other instruments from headphones in this price I've heard, and my builders intuition says there's that last bit of sound quality I can pull from these things to get them from great to incredible!

 

[Chloe]

Sorry to necro this but I was looking for similar for my Sennheiser M2 AEBT. The outer part of my ears were hurting from the plastic speaker grille, and I wanted to tame the treble a bit.

I ended up cutting thin (4mm approx) strips of memory foam from a small sample block that gave me enough to make a pair of pads 1x2" to put inside the cup. 2mm thins didn't seem to do much and were more like the thin foam on Portapro/PX100s.

There are varying densities of foam and the thicker stuff is used for soundproofing. The cheap soundproofing tiles from places like Ebay are more like the regular foam used in ear pads and absorb more upper mid to high end. I have these monitor isolators that are made of really dense foam, they really isolate the bass end well from cabinets and is more similar density to the foam used in the cups of my ear defenders.

 

[Chloe]

Some pics. I couldn't cover the noise cancelling mic on each ear because it affected the phase cancellation. So some of the diaphragm is not covered. It's much easier to put the ear pad on first and then put the memory foam inside than try to put the ear pad over. I didn't want to glue the foam in place.