Are these the worst SR-009 set in the world? Aka. why everybody should stay away from modified headphones

[spritzer]

So I bought a lot of modified headphones on ebay, SR-Lambda Signature, SR-007Mk2 and SR-009.  They looked to be in rough condition so I thought, worst case I'll tinker with them and have some more spare parts for my stock.  Now... the first two units were bad... really bad but I fully rebuilt them from my stock of spare parts.  Now I've been fixing up lost cause headphones for 20 years but still, these were the worst I've ever seen.  Missing parts everywhere and utterly retarded ways of "improving" them by making everything worse.  Now, I had left the 009's in their box until this morning and wow... just wow...

So what are we looking at, these are the outside protection grills... taped to the outside of the housing with some rubber/butyl type tape.  The earpads are fixed in place with it as well and it covers up the cable entry on both earcups.  Now... this is after repairing two utter clusterfucks of incompetence and stupidity but yeah, not prepared for this one.  

Pull off the earpads and the tape around the cable entry and this is what greeted me.  Just look at that soldering, the holes in the dust covers and well... the driver in backwards.  These are dipoles like all Stax... it won't change anything to put it in backwards.  There was nothing holding the earpads in except more of that glue and notice one missing screw on the driver.  It gets worse though...

Here is the driver removed and there is no dust cover at all.  Yeah...nothing at all. 

Here is the other channel with just the tape over the cable entry removed.  How this is supposed to improve performance is completely beyond me... 

Here is the housing with the driver removed and just look at all that adhesive residue.  That ties into this, the earpads:

Now they are utter trash at this point but look at the adhesive residue on them, that is hot glue!  The most useless of adhesive which should only be used by kids in arts and bloody crafts! 

So end results is these headphones are completely fucked.  The arc and housings can be used and the cable might be ok but the drivers are probably beyond hope.  Add to this all the missing hardware and I'm not sure what I'll do with them.  I might try to find a dead set of 009's with driver failure and make one good set out of the two or something creative. 

Final lesson, if somebody says they are modifying headphones and improving performance... odds are it is something like this. 

[tin ear]

i was just starting out. i don't use hot glue anymore.

[chinsettawong]

The guy certainly didn’t know and understand what he had done - what a pity!  

[spritzer]

13 hours ago, tin ear said:

i was just starting out. i don't use hot glue anymore.

Just don't do any of this, none of it is an improvement and just fucks up the sound for no good reason. 

[mikeymad]

MOZART
What are you doing, Herr Director?

ORSINI-ROSENBERG
Taking out what you should never have put in.

[mrmarbach]

Spritzer you bring this on yourself. What were you expecting?

[spritzer]

Hehe not sure but I always like to take a basket case and make something useful out of it.  I do have some plans for these 009's which might help with them all in the future... 

[Pirx]

Are you going to mod that pair of 009, trying to "resolve" the issue with sound that you are so sensitive?

That would be interesting, I was also wondering what can be done to flatten frequency response of this headphones.

Edited January 5, 2023 by Pirx

[spritzer]

I might do that and also fix that stupid cable entry and how the earpads are mounted.  It's on the back burner though as I want to mull it over a bit. 

[Spork]

To be fair to hot glue, I had some success using it to create all sorts of multi-chamber bongs 35-40 years ago.

[spritzer]

I really need to do something with these...