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ATM. Custom Headphone Cables.

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Hi.
I post seeking assistance and or advice on something rather niche. I recently acquired a new pair of headphones. They sound splendid but there is a problem. The cable is awful. It’s too short, aesthetically it borders on the offensive and the build quality of it is flimsy. It works fine but for the reasons above I would dearly like to replace it. My question then is obvious I guess. Does anyone know of a reputable builder of custom cables? I can’t afford silly money or indeed any money right at this moment but for future reference your valuable advice would be gratefully received. Thanks.

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  2. Hifiman Sundara. The cable is detachable so I’m looking for a ten foot cable with 3.5 male jacks all round. Two at the Headphone end and one for connecting to my amp which for some unfathomable reason has a 3.5 female headphone socket. I am fussy about cables. They need to be well built. Preferably braided, nicely finished and using quality components. As I said I can’t afford to get one made at the moment but when a sale or two of my work hopefully transpires I will happily pay around £150 or so for the right cable.

    • A quick (?) word from our sponsor. The Hifiman Sundara cans are magneplanar. There are a number of technologies available to make headphones – magnetic coils, balanced armature, electrostatic. Magneplanar cans are the best quality you can get without introducing life-threatening voltages. I run a pair of Audeze ‘maggies’ myself.

    • I’m basing that cost on what I’ve seen quoted on sites that offer the service. I’ve tried cheap cables before on other bits of audio kit and frankly they are not great. Poor sound quality and lousy build. I don’t mind using more reasonably priced cables that get hidden behind my kit rack but these are nice headphones so I think they should not be compromised they deserve a bit of “hifi jewelry”. The reason I’m asking youse lot is the cost. I want to make sure that whoever I commission to build the cable for me is honest & reliable. One can’t always tell that from looking at a website and I trust the recommendations from folks on here.

  5. Orchid is a good starting point. Or…

    3.5mm stereo plugs are a PITA to solder and not robust. Mono 3.5mm plugs are not so bad.

    Would you consider a 6.35mm stereo jack at the amp end with a quality (Neutrik) reducer like this:

    It will be much easier to find a studio-quality 6.35mm stereo to 2x 6.35mm mono Y-lead and a dull friend who would be happy to solder 3.5mm mono plugs onto the ends for you. And I reckon you’d still have £120 of your budget left.

  7. Hi Steve.
    I am at your mercy!
    This is all I can report with any accuracy.
    All I require is a ten foot cable that is good quality that won’t coil itself up and will lie straight with 3.5 jacks at the headphone end, one for the right cup, one for the left cup and a way of connecting the lead to my amp that for some unfathomable reason has a female 3.5 headphone socket. Obviously it needs to be of a good enough quality not to compromise the sound of the headphones, which is very nice btw. The only other thing is it obviously needs to be robust. My Grado 325e has a cable that could accurately be described as “industrial” and I’m fine with that as long as the cable is not so heavy that it pulls the headphones forward when they are on my head. The Grado cable isn’t detachable unfortunately or I’d use that. The reason I’ve bought the Sundara is simply because although I like my Grados they are bloody uncomfortable for long listening sessions and due to the pandemic I’m using headphones a lot more to spare my long suffering downstairs neighbour from being besieged by hours of jazz thumping through her ceiling.
    So if what you are advising will accomplish my needs. No diminishing of sound and durability then point me at it. Diolch butty.
    P.S. if you look on YouTube there are a fair few videos about these headphones. They all complain about the stock cable. They are all correct to do so. It’s awful.

    • The most robust option is going to be a 6.35mm stereo plug on the cable (amp end) with a 6.35-to-3.5mm reducer. If the reducer ever plays up, just replace it.

      Straight stereo 3.5mm plugs are awful things, they’re too small for decent (robust) soldering. Neutrik don’t make them anymore, but they do a right-angled one which has a decent cable clamp to make it more robust.

      I’ll get a priced parts list together and send you the options.

      • Thanks Steve. I’m not sure right angled plugs will fit. The connections on the earcups are positioned slightly forward so they are not completely on the underside of the headphones. The plugs on the stock lead fit tightly. They click into place. It’s the only aspect of them I approve of, if they are not pushed all the way home they don’t engage resulting in no sound.
        I have no problem with using an adaptor at the amp end. I’d use an extension cable for the phones if the stock cable was worth the effort but frankly it’s so dreadful I’d rather just replace it completely. Hence this thread.

    • Hi Fitter.
      Blimey Kimber cables are properly extortionate are they not. I suppose if you can afford a few thousand for a pair of headphones maybe that wouldn’t be a concern but my pockets are rather more shallow to put it mildly. The others seem to be terminated for a balanced connection with an XLR plug. My amp doesn’t have a balanced headphone jack although it is a balanced amp. Thanks though Fitter.

        • I found a £12 custom-made 10ft cable with neutrik plugs from Lynx and deleted my post suggesting it because I felt silly once I saw what other people were suggesting 😬

          Hundreds of quid on a cable? I didn’t know people really did that.

            • Musical Fidelity, whose products often seem to verge on insanity (1300W per channel amplifier, anyone?), described their most recent phono preamp as “entry-level”. The price? £1200. I suppose by comparison to the next model up their range, at £1700, it is. A bit.

            • A friend of mine who is a sound engineer, as opposed to me, a van driver with video ears that picked up some stuff along the way, says he can hear the difference between some cables. I am unconvinced. I’m not sure my ears were ever that good although there have been and still are occasions when I either hear something in a song that I haven’t noticed before or am impressed by the clarity of sound. The other day, I played my vinyl copy of John Lee Hooker’s The Healer and it sounded great whereas other vinyl can sound a bit meh. Maybe it really is my ears.

                • I can hear the difference between a decently made cable and a badly constructed one. It’s probably caused by a lack of decent shielding in one rather than the other. It’s worth paying a little more for good build quality but not stupid money. However if you can afford really astonishingly expensive components I don’t suppose spending preposterous amounts on cables is an issue.

                  • I am quite sure there is a quality point below which it is obvious but as long as there is some decent thick copper and an adequate shield they are all basically the same. Few monstrously expensive ones pass a blind test. Positioning speakers and chair properly make a much bigger difference.

                    • Essentially yes, with provisos. Copper oxidises in air at room temperature, and copper oxide (the green stuff on a church roof) is an insulator. Find an old speaker lead, cut the insulation off, the first few inches will be green.

                      So some kind of plating is required. Not to make it better, but to stop it getting worse. My speaker cable is silver-plated, the banana plugs are gold-plated.

                      As I’m sure I’ve said before, most people would benefit from spending a couple of hundred quid on some acoustic treatment for their room rather than spending thousands on new equipment. The best sound reproduction I ever heard was some fairly basic kit through LS5/8 speakers in an acoustically-treated BBC radio studio.

          • I agree with you both.
            Although altering speaker positions and acoustical room treatments are both redundant strategies when it comes to headphones.
            I took a fairly long while positioning my speakers and yes even as little as an inch or two in any direction can make a difference. Keep those sound waves from bouncing around off hard surfaces to a minimum. I’m happy with the sound I have achieved from my kit, it’s not staggeringly expensive but it’s decent and it brings me joy.
            I’ve used the same silver coated QED wire for my speakers for years. It’s not expensive and I’ve never felt dissatisfied with it. I use Chord Company interconnects throughout the rest of my rig, again not expensive but decent, well constructed cables. I struggle to understand why someone will happily part with more than a couple of hundred quid/bucks/whatever and then baulk at spending at least a couple of quid/bucks/whatever on a few decent cables. If I have saved hard to be able to buy a piece of kit I want to make sure I’m getting the most out of it, otherwise why bother?

      • I once had a bit of a run-in with Mr Andrews at a trade show. He was selling what looked very much to me* like something out of a familiar electronics trade catalogue, in a rebranded blister pack, for an extorionate mark-up. When I mentioned this, I was frog-marched out of the room and told in no uncertain terms not to return.

        (*) allegedly, M’Lud.

      • Hi again, Pencil.
        The Russ Andrews cables are a lot cheaper than the Kimber – but if the terminations aren’t right, then useless, as you say…

        FWIW, I wouldn’t pay for Kimber cable…and didn’t want to suggest them…the link I posted shouldn’t go to the Kimber page.

  10. Sometimes I wake up of a morning in my colonial outpost and get the feeling that there’s been a tear in the fabric of the universe overnight and I’ve slipped though to an alternate reality.

    What are these headphone cables of which you speak with such loving if baffling authority? I fully accept that my hearing might be getting on a bit, Mrs thep would certainly agree (“What do you mean you can’t hear the awful noise the fridge is making?”). But I said goodbye to headphone cable angst years ago, along with physical media, and I am content with my lot.

    Naturally I hope you find what you’re looking for at a sensible price, Squeezer.

    • Hi Leeds.
      I tried a cable made of the same wire and sheath a while ago for a different reason. It’s not good. It looks and feels fine but for some reason it doesn’t sound right. It robbed the sound of dynamics, everything sounded veiled.
      The arguments around cables in the wacky world of hifi are legendary and legion and whilst I agree that paying insane amounts of money is unnecessary there are good cables and crap cables and there is a difference that can be heard. It’s not a night and day difference but I can hear it immediately.
      I thought about the above and almost bought them then I had a rumage around in my Drawer of Discarded Things and found the cable I had previously bought to extend the reach of my Grado headphones and hooked it up. It sounded exactly as I remembered it. Not good. I swapped it out for the QED lead I eventually bought and immediately the Grados sounded noticeably different in a good way.

  12. Back to the OP, I’ve had braided headphone cables and the scraping on my jumper etc sets my teeth on edge. Nice smooth rubber is much nicer. Moose, over to you.

    • I only ever listen to headphones when I am completely naked and slathered in I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.
      They sound better that way so microphonic noise caused by rubbing up against braided cables isn’t an issue.
      I wear wireless IEMs when out in public now. I got fed up of being arrested. There aren’t too many audiophiles in the force in my experience. I did find that magistrates can take a slightly more lenient view if one tells them that one was listening to a little light classical or Radio 4 though.

    • Hi Gary
      I checked them out and one I think was called Cosmic Cables. My amp is balanced but it doesn’t have a balanced headphone socket on the fascia just balanced connections on the rear. I suppose I could use an adaptor but I’ll be content with a single ended unbalanced connection on a decent cable.
      I considered running balanced cables from my amp to my external dac but I can’t see there being that much benefit to doing so. My cable runs are not long and I don’t suffer from a ground loop effect so again single ended unbalanced works just fine.
      As I wrote above I do need a pretty long cable and of course costs increase because of that. My guesstimate from looking at a number of sites is £150. That’s going to take me the best part of a year to save and that’s assuming I manage to sell some work so I’m open to other suggestions in the meantime. Diolch.

        • Headphones, like loudspeakers, are driven by a current passing through a voice coil in a magnetic field. The current is induced by generating an eletro-motive force (Voltage) across the impedance of the coil.

          There’s nothing to say that one end of the coil has to be at common Ground. Bridged or Class-D power amps swing both ways.*

          Headphones usually, of course, are driven single-ended with one end of both coils held at a common ground. They can be driven in balanced mode with each earcup driven separately. It doubles the number of parts in the amplifier and the improvement is usually fairly minimal. Most often, better to spend the extra money on better cans.

          As Peter says, short leads and an electrically-quiet environment, there’s probably no need for balanced leads.

          If you were listening to headphones next to something with a large motor or a spark plug, say a lathe or a motorbike, then balanced headphone leads would really make sense. Not that I would recommend either scenario.

          (*) Hello, Moosey!

  14. *Footnote.
    I finally had a cable made. Sadly Lynx Cables were unable to supply me with the cable I decided upon so I contacted Ian at Cosmic Cables who made me exactly what I wanted with impressive alacrity. Ordered it from him on a Sunday and received it five days later. It looks and most importantly sounds beautiful.

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