T50MKIII

Discussion in 'Headphones' started by MuZo2, Oct 4, 2015.

  1. spoony

    spoony Spooky

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    You can 'flatten' the bass peak which helps with the subjective cleanliness. Make a 'mask' over the cup ports with a 2-3mm diameter hole, you can use tape. Try this without disassembling, tape over the vents on the outside and poke a hole with a small screwdriver.

    Edit: Do you have a picture of your mods?
     
    Last edited: May 31, 2020
  2. Biodegraded

    Biodegraded Friend

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    Ha! No, sorry, everything's reassembled now. If I pull them apart again to insert cotton, plasticine etc. before the new pads arrive, or if after the new pads come they need revisiting, I'll photograph everything then.

    For now they're a bit V-shaped but I'm not too displeased.
     
  3. spoony

    spoony Spooky

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    You should be able to improve the upper mids. Make sure the cosmetic pad is sitting flush with the driver. It's been a while since I had the mk3 to mod and I don't think I used anything else directly against the driver, but there's a small chance I added felt as well between the driver and cosmetic pad.
     
  4. spoony

    spoony Spooky

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    So I opened up my mk2 pair to see my solution and I found this:

    photo_2020-06-01_09-04-12.jpg

    I have the hole aligned with the cup vent. The pad is now squished and discolored but measures close to new. It's very easy to replace those anyway. You can see I added very thick felt over the cup vents with a smaller port to tune the bass. What's behind the cosmetic pad?

    photo_2020-06-01_09-04-08.jpg

    That's ~2mm wool felt, but I remember many types having approximately the same effect. But didn't the mk2 driver have paper covering the whole backside?

    photo_2020-06-01_09-03-58.jpg

    Not for me, I think I did this to improve the transient response in the bass. So I have a solution which could very much work with the mk3 variants. I hadn't touched it in years since I was happy with the results.

    I'd try the felt or something resembling felt behind the driver next.
     
  5. Biodegraded

    Biodegraded Friend

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    This is the one in the measurement? Wow you really went all-out there, that must have taken quite a few trials! Is that foam stuffed into the back of the cup?

    Your third photo shows there really is a difference between Mk2 and Mk3 drivers: vent position. From Tyll's photo in my earlier post this isn't obvious because of the 100% paper covering on Mk2. Because the Mk2 driver vent is in the corner, it's almost aligned with the centre of the cup vent whereas being in the lower-middle of the Mk3 driver it's offset from the cup vent. That's interesting and will likely call for some differences in vent-baffling strategy...

    Thanks very much for pulling them apart and photographing, that gives me a few more ideas. I'll report back if I make satisfactory progress.
     
  6. spoony

    spoony Spooky

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    No, I no longer have that pair, this is from a mk2 mod that I still have.

    Yeah, but you could use almost anything there given you tune the other elements around it. (Cotton tends to eat bass, so maybe you'd make the vent bigger)

    Yeah, originally there was no vent, I cut this square to improve on bass impact, and tried to align it with the cup vent so I wouldn't have to worry if some extra damping fell over the vent if it was sideways. The membrane possibly doesn't have the optimal motion due to this, but I didn't find the result objectionable.
     
  7. Biodegraded

    Biodegraded Friend

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    Ah, now I get it - I understood you'd cut that bit of paper away, but I thought that the 4 holes in the plate beneath were in different places on Mk2 vs Mk3. But now I assume they're everywhere on the plate, so papers aside the driver units could indeed be the same (5 years late to this party so still figuring these things out :confused:).

    Thanks again for all the info.
     
  8. spoony

    spoony Spooky

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    Yeah, they looked pretty much identical to me aside from the damping solution.
     
  9. JK47

    JK47 Guest

    I guess it's time to post where my modded pair of T20RP mkIII have ended up in the grand scheme of things.
    t20rp.jpg
    t20 dist.jpg

    First off, to get the most out of the TxxRP series they need some decent power, so I modded them to accept a mini XLR on the headphone side of things and a 4 pin XLR on the amp side. Careful drilling did the deed for the mini xlr, and yes that is hot glue plugging the old headphone jack, and seals perfectly fine.
    IMG_3164.jpg

    I initially wanted to hear the moar bigger bass of the T20, but in hindsight it's too much and ended up taping the vent fully shut, basically making them a T40. I found thick angled pads from Mr. Speakers and ZMF added too much bass and general frequency fuckery to be of any use to me. I used the stock pads for a long time and they were ok, but the sound was a little lean, so I sourced a set of Dekoni pads that are angled (I think they might actually be for the Fostex TH-X00, I don't remember) but nowhere near as thick as the other two previously mentioned. They work quite well and don't blow up the bottom end all that much.
    IMG_3165.jpg
    I also added the inner earpad foam from the HD650 and one piece of 2 ply toilet paper over the driver to tame the sizzling treble. Other than that, I added 1.5 teased out cotton balls per cup and called it a day. I wanted to keep everything simple, I guess the XLR mod isn't, but these things absolutely crush electronic music when driven by a speaker amp.

    Like many others the Fostex TxxRP series is what got me into DIY and more seriously into the headphone world and high value gear.
     
  10. Philimon

    Philimon Friend

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  11. spoony

    spoony Spooky

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    Thinner pads as well as narrow entry help with the hot treble.
     
  12. Biodegraded

    Biodegraded Friend

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    Ok, pretty happy with these now. Here, roughly aligned in the lower mids, are the FRs for my current mods and the pre-modded but driver-equalized average (see posts #140 & #151). Note that the bass doesn’t really roll off as much as it appears; my flat foam coupler is smallish and open around the edges and the mic is supported only by the foam, and I think the sub-bass ‘escapes’. Listening, including with sine sweeps, reveals a much closer sub-bass to mid-bass balance than this.

    [​IMG]

    Summary of mods:
    • Pads: no-name angled pleather with skirts removed, stuck directly onto front plate
    • Cups: filled with cotton balls (6), loosely packed but taking all the space
    • Rear vent: covered with a rectangle of cosmetic pad sponge nestled between the cotton balls
    • Rear driver damping: 4/2 layers of gauze/paper bandage, with square cut out for driver vents, taped on with micropore
    • Rear of driver baffle plates loaded with plasticine
    • Front baffle vents: 6/8 (all 4 top & bottom, lower rear & upper front) covered with electrical tape
    • Front driver filtering: 3 plies of thin toilet paper under front foam
    In this photo there’s a cotton ball over the cup vent (middle-left of the cup) which I later replaced with a rectangle of cosmetic foam because with cotton balls there was a bit much channel imbalance in the bass. Bass quality is very similar. I don’t think the plasticine does much, it’s only about 10g per cup so the mass loading effect would be minimal. The cotton pretty much fills to the top of the square ‘bowl’ part of the cup, leaving the upper, oval ‘saucer’ free, so the gauze on the back of the driver only loosely contacts the foam when assembled. You can see that the rubber cushions on the 4 posts in the cup, which sit against the tape around the outside of the driver when the two halves are put together, remain standing proud of the cotton balls.

    [​IMG]

    Following @spoony , instead of the gauze bandage I tried the cosmetic sponges – both full-size, which fit snugly between the 4 support posts, and cut square and taped to the back of the driver, in both cases with a 5mm hole punched over the driver vent. But I thought the bass texture, particularly the reverb on bass guitar decays, was better with the gauze so I went back to that.

    Here’s the front for completeness, showing the TP beneath the front foam, the double-sided sticky ‘Command’ wall-hook pads used to secure the pads to the front plate, and one of the pads with its skirt removed. You can’t really see the tape strips used to cover the baffle-plate vents which are around the outside edge of the foam ring (I only had black tape!).

    [​IMG]

    I did the modding kind of backwards – I was waiting for replacement pads so did everything else first to see what I could accomplish with the stock ones, which got me to the result in post #156. I didn’t mind this too much, but the dip in the upper mids definitely detracted. When trying other pads, I went back to tweak the front filtering (treble), front venting (bass) and rear cup stuffing (mid-bass) before settling on a configuration that was close to what I liked best with the stock pads (1 more layer of TP in front and sponge rather than cotton wool over the rear vent, though that was more for balance than sound).

    Shure 840 pads gave me a similar response through the low end but maintained a dip through the upper mids and introduced a spike in the treble. Not a success.

    Dekoni Fostex pleather pads gave a bit too much bass and muffled the treble. Possibly these would be ok for treble-sensitive listeners, but only those with small ears – the ear holes are very small. They fit me, but only just. These were the last ones I tried and already being happy with my favoured pads I didn’t do much experimentation. Could’ve reduced the bass a bit more by removing more front-vent tapes.

    I spent quite a bit of time with Brainwavz angled pleather pads, which are hell to get on but can be persuaded to fit. Like the Dekonis, these filled most of the dip in the upper mids; but for my tastes they put too much emphasis on bass and lower mids, regardless of whether the skirts were fitted into the slot in the baffle or stretched right over the cups as you’d fit them to Mk2 models. Even taped directly to the front plate, the bump in the bass persisted. And I didn’t think the timbre through the bass and lower mids was as realistic as with my preferred pads.

    I initially thought what ended up as my preferred pads were going to be a fail, as I couldn’t get the skirts to fit over the plates. These appear to be cheap knock-offs of the Brainwavz pads, featuring softer, shinier pleather and maybe softer foam, no right/left difference (so the seam goes at the top on one side and the bottom on the other), and a width about half a centimeter narrower than the real things (pretty narrow – maybe not good for big ears). After trying trimming the skirts to various degrees I ended up cutting them right off to enable sticking them straight onto the front of the baffles, and after tweaking bass and treble adjustments the result remains my favoured one for all of tonal balance, technicalities and timbre.

    The double-sided wall-hook pads to mount them (see photo) are adequate but not the most secure; have to be careful not to dislodge the pads while putting the headphones on/taking them off. If anybody has a better solution, please let me know!
     
  13. spoony

    spoony Spooky

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    Good job! I had the brawinwavz sheepskin pads installed for a while, nice FR but I didn't like the tunnel-like effect on the soundstage, do you find that to be the case with these pads as well?
     
  14. Biodegraded

    Biodegraded Friend

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    I didn't notice this with the Brainwavz (pleather in my case). Staging and imaging maybe weren't as precise as with the cheapo pads, but that point in the modding was before I'd switched from (evidently variable-density) cotton balls to sponge bits over the rear vents so I was having trouble with channel balance, and tbh I was listening for tonality more than technicalities then too.

    The Dekonis, though, did seem to narrow the stage, as well as whacking treble and upper mids.
     
  15. DEATHxMACHINE

    DEATHxMACHINE Friend

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  16. Biodegraded

    Biodegraded Friend

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  17. DEATHxMACHINE

    DEATHxMACHINE Friend

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    It gets spendy when you want to put them on everything.
     
  18. rendyG

    rendyG Acquaintance

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    I can recommend ZMF-ish Lambskin oval pads from Ali, I think I've bought them for like $25.
    I actually preffered them to original Cowhide pads which were too hard but had awesome sub bass.
     
  19. Fallenangel

    Fallenangel Friend

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  20. Philimon

    Philimon Friend

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    Cool.
    [​IMG]
    https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5337887
    The front-side circular driver support ring seems like a rush job. I would square it to shape of driver.
    I could print these for y'all my friends but I would have to charge each $600 $800 dollars.
     
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