HD650 KISS mod

Yes, the baffle screen is a much darker color than that on my recent HD 650.

 

My take on the KISS mod.

I bought this HD650 at a garage sale. It was an impulse buy, and I immediately regretted it.

It was really dirty, the headband foam was non existing, the ear pads were torn. At least I got a new set of Sennheiser pads with it. The headband was too loose and the painting was peeling off. When arrived home I noticed that the cables were superglued to the headphones, the left driver was loose and half of the foam behind the drivers was missing and was deteriorating.

Of course it sounded really bad. So I cleaned it, put a new aftermarket headband cover on it, bent back the metal to make it fit a human head, pushed back the drivers, removed the excess superglue, reterminated the cable to XLR balanced (this was the first soldering I did in my life), and did the KISS mod. I put some orange foam on the dynamite extreme, I bought at a 100yen shop and tried to paint it black with a black marker with not much success. I used the back foams from my other modded HD650. I put some more dynamat on the sides and on the top, because I already cut those pieces and didn’t want to throw them out.

Maybe I got emotionally attached to it after saving it from decay but it does sounds amazingly good. I use it from an Yggdrasil and a Jotunheim and it is so smooth, and the slight decrease of mid-bass is making it a really good all-arounder. I think this will be my main headphone for a long time. Thank you Marvey for the instructions.

 

They have garage sales in Japan? Cool!

 

Didn't have any of the rear foam left so I used my spare front foam pads and cut from those and just used one layer instead of two. Needless to say, I won't be able to sell these to anybody after the craftsmanship of my mods that is pretty comparative to a five year old. Is there such thing as too much dynamat to where it becomes detrimental? Since I already had a dynamat donut over the magnet, I didn't want to try to rip it off with all the leftover gunk it would have, so I just added more on top to glue down foam.

 

Hey, I found my rear foam! Going to have to stop at Michael's and get some of that Creatology adhesive.

 

Decided to change to this mod as well, at first i didn't mind the midbass hump but after switching to aes on Yggdrasil it has become a bit too obnoxious with certain music. If you want to make sure the channel balance is right you can use sinegen or something similar. The placement of the rear foam is indeed very critical.

 

I used second skin damplifier pro.
Puts my other headphones to shame.

 

I was just thinking about how happy I am with the HD600 and I put up the 650 I had for sale because I cant afford to spend the time and take the risk of messing up channel balance and what not while modding the 650 to be a better 600.. and then you post that graph.

sigh, the audio life is never simple is it?

 

Mod took me just like 5-10 min.

 

Also channel matching looks pretty good after my mod
Looks like I have a little to fix in the lower region though, but that could be seal, ill have to check

 

All mods that deal with channel imbalance (mainly foam insertion) are easily reversible and adjustable. And like @spwath mentioned, takes 5-10m for initial placement, and seconds to readjust until channel balance is correct. The only irreversible mod is spider cage removal.

^^ that some good channel matching btw

 

Do you have pics of your mod? I was also gonna use second skin.

 

I did a pretty sloppy job but here:

 

Marvey, thanks for your time spent working on this as well as the guidance for making the mods. Always loved my hd650 but this has helped me fall into love all over again. Haven't been able to take them off!

I have yet to put the foam into the magnet hole, but i plan to experiment with it at some point.

Who knows, perhaps Sennheiser will take a page from the Marvey Book-O-Mods and try something like this in the next released revision...HD650S ??!?

 

I would want to try leaving it open, but I would be afraid junk would fall onto driver...

 

That was one of my concerns as well running without backfoam for a while, keeping it in the box did the trick though.

 

Hah, I threw mine away by mistake. Some rubber cement and fine nylon mesh (from a liberated yarn bag) did the job- a single layer of mesh on driver hole just took the edge off the bass, which was so out of its box that it was swamping the mids.

 

Opened them up real quick and just covered the hole with one small layer as opposed to folding over and going into the hole slightly...there was too much bass imo with nothing after adding the dynamat , which was kinda fun for a day but got annoying. Only been listening for a few minutes thus far but it does seem to have helped to tame the bass. Perhaps tomorrow i will try Marvey's folding / "putting some in the hole" (haha) method.