Sennheiser PC37X randomly goes bad after disconnecting the cable ?
Greetings, Yesterday I was using my headset like normal with my macbook, just listening to music and on a call with people like usual, and the headset was perfectly fine. The stock wire that came with the headset is extremely long and yesterday it annoyed me very much that it kept getting tangled with itself, so I decided to see if the cable is replaceable. I pulled out the cable from the headset and saw the adapter, and looked online for a replacement. Upon plugging it back in, the audio sounded extremely muffled and washed out. Im not sure what I did wrong to make it mess up like that as I've always taken good care of it, ive had it for about 2 years and its always just been chilling on my desk, but anywho I thought the cable just went bad and ordered a replacement. The replacement came, and the issue is still persistant, so I am not sure what the issue is I've tried multiple different headsets and the issue is not with the port, and I also tried it with my windows laptop and...
Apr 23, 2024
The only indication that I have, other than the cable with the NEMA 5-15P connector on it, that the DarkVoice I received is 110V, is a small, white sticker on the box it was shipped in indicating a Massdrop part number ending in -110V.
I have just started to get caught up on the head-fi thread on DarkVoice tube rolling, but thank you for the information as I have not gotten that far into it yet. While I don't feel good about the lack luster performance, it does make me feel a little better that others are experiencing the same issue (and some seem to think the stock tubes are just fine, so maybe poor quality control on the tubes).
Thanks again for the replies and photos.
As for the tubes, I have not pulled them out (they are hot now, so I am not going to do it anytime soon) to see what they look like in greater detail. From what I can see, the bottoms of both tubes (the power tube more so than the smaller tube), is dark/black on bottom. I can't recall if this was there before or something that has shown up as I've used it, but I think it is normal for tubes to have an area that has a dark/black/grey-ish looking area called the getter (if it turns white, that is bad and indicates a loss of vacuum). I'll keep an eye on the dark spots at the bottom to see if they get larger or change color.
Here are a couple of helpful articles that I found today by the same author that discuss tube burn in on the DarkVoice 336SE and methods for determining if you have a bad tube. http://blog.thetubestore.com/burning-in-6sn7-tubes-for-the-dark-voice-336se-headphone-amp/
http://blog.thetubestore.com/how-to-tell-if-your-tube-is-bad/
On day two, it seems the DV sounds a little better than right out of the box (day one). There is still a lot of distortion, but it sounds more muddy today than straight blown out speakers flapping in the breeze. It might be that I need to burn the tubes in more or that I let them warm up longer before beating on them today. I guess I should get some more hours of listening and burn in before I make my final conclusion of this amp and default tubes. After all, Zeos Pantera likes his DV with default tubes (swap to RCAs recently) and I haven't heard this kind of distortion in any of his sound demos.