marcusekner
Racer
I feel like telling you a little about what I've done to my headphones over the years.
The AKG K518dj is nothing like hi-fi. They aren't neat, and certainly not dull. They pack a lot of power and punch, but thats about it. I bought them about three years ago. About 2,9 years ago the connector broke, so I went about replacing the cable and connector.
These phones are really easy to disassemble. They are sturdy and have a lot of room inside. After replacing the cable I filled the cups with wool from a local audio store, and the sound got less boxy.
Then I replaced the normal straight wire with quad-braided cat5 cable, that I braided myself, and added a sturdy gold-plated metal cased connector. This really brought out a lot of clarity and contrast from the headphones. When compared, the stock headphones sound fuzzy. Maybe it's good for masking imperfections in mp3 or other lossy formats, but as I use only lossless audio files, I felt good bringing out more of its beauty.
I had long been concerned with how easily these headphones lost control at high volumes, so I ordered some neodymium magnets which now fills out much of the box/can of the headphones. It made these headphones really sing with power and never ending clarity. Never again will a heavy bass note drown for example the vocals again. It does not matter how loud or not-so-loud you play, the character of the sound is always the same - crispy.
However, I have had one issue lately, following the added power of the already overly powerful headphones of mine. Their resonance frequency were way too high - probably like 100-150hz. It had a big impact on vocals as they suddenly could dip down into the resonating-bit and that just sounded awful.
In an attempt to fix this, I added a long (as long as could fit there with one bendy-straw) piece of drinking straw to act as a bass reflex port. Some of you might think that venting the box would just add to the bad bass experience, but making the speaker cone lose momentum at low frequencies (as the speaker cone moves less at the port's rf) might just help me. And it did. A bit of the low frequency boxiness is gone, and have been replaced by something way cooler. Before, these headphones could only reach down to about 45hz, but now they go down way deeper.
Now I can gladly adjust my ipod's eq a tad bit (lower on the bass, that is) and listen to my flac-songs and have an even bigger smile on my face. For the record, I use the rockbox firmware/os for my ipod, so I'm not that limited in what I can and cannot play.
All in all I have in my headphones:
BIG neodymium magnets
Braided cable, gold plated all-metal plug
Wool-dampening
Bass reflex ports.
The result:
Not quite hi-fi, but really close. And very, very powerful. You can listen to really heavy and loud music when you feel like it, and at the end of the day you can settle down with some beautiful tunes and still like it just as much.
The AKG K518dj is nothing like hi-fi. They aren't neat, and certainly not dull. They pack a lot of power and punch, but thats about it. I bought them about three years ago. About 2,9 years ago the connector broke, so I went about replacing the cable and connector.
These phones are really easy to disassemble. They are sturdy and have a lot of room inside. After replacing the cable I filled the cups with wool from a local audio store, and the sound got less boxy.
Then I replaced the normal straight wire with quad-braided cat5 cable, that I braided myself, and added a sturdy gold-plated metal cased connector. This really brought out a lot of clarity and contrast from the headphones. When compared, the stock headphones sound fuzzy. Maybe it's good for masking imperfections in mp3 or other lossy formats, but as I use only lossless audio files, I felt good bringing out more of its beauty.
I had long been concerned with how easily these headphones lost control at high volumes, so I ordered some neodymium magnets which now fills out much of the box/can of the headphones. It made these headphones really sing with power and never ending clarity. Never again will a heavy bass note drown for example the vocals again. It does not matter how loud or not-so-loud you play, the character of the sound is always the same - crispy.
However, I have had one issue lately, following the added power of the already overly powerful headphones of mine. Their resonance frequency were way too high - probably like 100-150hz. It had a big impact on vocals as they suddenly could dip down into the resonating-bit and that just sounded awful.
In an attempt to fix this, I added a long (as long as could fit there with one bendy-straw) piece of drinking straw to act as a bass reflex port. Some of you might think that venting the box would just add to the bad bass experience, but making the speaker cone lose momentum at low frequencies (as the speaker cone moves less at the port's rf) might just help me. And it did. A bit of the low frequency boxiness is gone, and have been replaced by something way cooler. Before, these headphones could only reach down to about 45hz, but now they go down way deeper.
Now I can gladly adjust my ipod's eq a tad bit (lower on the bass, that is) and listen to my flac-songs and have an even bigger smile on my face. For the record, I use the rockbox firmware/os for my ipod, so I'm not that limited in what I can and cannot play.
All in all I have in my headphones:
BIG neodymium magnets
Braided cable, gold plated all-metal plug
Wool-dampening
Bass reflex ports.
The result:
Not quite hi-fi, but really close. And very, very powerful. You can listen to really heavy and loud music when you feel like it, and at the end of the day you can settle down with some beautiful tunes and still like it just as much.
