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
By the time the first song was ending though, I just felt that something was missing. I am still not exactly sure as to the what that was missing, but there is just *something*. I suspect it has to do with the high's or high mids's because of some testing I did further down the road. Still, they do sound quite good. The bass is exquisite and the mids are very smooth and pretty well detailed. The highs are nothing special, they are not recessed but they are not pronounced either. Just nice and balanced overall with a definite emphasis on excellent bass. I have to say these are probably one of my favorite stock headphones.
Comfort wise these are among the best to me. My one complaint about all the really high end headphones out there is that they give me a headache after wearing them for more than 30 minutes to an hour. The pressure is just too much on my head. They need the pressure to make a solid seal, but the most amazing sound in the world is useless if you can only bear to listen to it for very short periods in a day. That is one reason the AKG K7XX are one of my most used headphones even though I don't exactly prefer how they sound, they are just extremely comfortable to wear for very long periods of time. I have used them for 12 hours straight before and not had a problem. These Fostex are very similar, a light touch on the head. They do press a bit more than the K7XX do, but nowhere near what the ZMF, P7s, and Alpha Primes do. I can easily wear these for a few hours at a time without developing a headache.
As for modding, I did try putting the ZMF Vibro earpads on these and wow did it change the sound drastically. I could try the Alpha Prime pads as well if enough people want me too, but I suspect they wont work great either and will just lead to too much pressure on my head and ruin the comfortability. That is also something the ZMF's did. Pressure isn't TOO bad, but it did start causing a headache after a while. Good thing too as it is just another reason for me not to use them. With the stock pads these headphones had epic bass and smoothness everywhere else, even if it did having a small "something" that felt missing. As soon as I put the ZMF pads on the bass dropped drastically, it lost all of that tightness and felt like a bloated, floppy mess with no detail to it at all. The mid's were just insanely scooped and the high's were oppressively bad. I had to take an EQ and widen the bandwidth as much as possible at 500Hz and boost it by 5db, then take a shelf EQ and set it to 4.5K and drop the highs off by 3db. That made the headphones sound bearable, but still not great. At this point they were just average cans with sucky bass. The one positive thing I have to say about the combination of these headphones and pads is that certain something I couldn't place my finger on seemed to be back. So whatever is missing is somewhere in the high mid or high detail. Anyway, I had quite enough of how bad this sounded so back to the stock pads for now. I will be buying another set of pads, hopefully some velour to try out, and see how those change the sound. That review will have to be in another week or two. I also plan on modding these and port the cans a bit and see how the sound signature changes. I might wait and get a second pair to do that with though as I don't want to ruin the headphones if I end up not liking the sound signature, and the bass is already pretty much as perfect as can be so porting the headphones and adding some damping might just make them sound way too warm and deep.
So that's it for now. Tomorrow I will edit this and add a direct comparison between these and the Alpha Prime's (since these have an MSRB of the old, more expensive price of the Primes).