Sennheiser 558 foam removal mod

[Art Vandelay]

I just thought I'd share this with you all. If you have Sennheiser 558s, there are strips of foam in the back of the ear cup, behind the driver, making them have less of an open sound. I have no idea why Sennheiser put these in, except possibly to make the 598s look better.

The only real difficulty in doing this is removing the ear cup. The technique I found worked best was pulling the ear cup outward and upward. I'm mostly just posting this because there's not much information on how to remove the ear cups, which is the hardest part.



You can see the clip mechanism that holds the ear cups here:


Here it is with the ear cup taken off:


And here's a random picture of my cat that was on my camera:


After you have the ear cup off, you just remove the 3 screws, take the driver out (be careful, obviously) and then pull the strip of foam off of the inside of the ear cup.

I've found that this makes the sound less sharp and the bass a little less boomy.

Also, please don't blame me if you damage your headphones by doing this.

Edit: I've uploaded the images on imgur this time. Please tell me if they are still broken.

[Pithan]

pics are not showing up for me
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[Art Vandelay]

pics are not showing up for me

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I haven no idea why that happened, I'll try another site when my internet stops being broken.

 

Edit: it's not my internet, google chrome is just broken again.

[Cheesebaron]

Generally the foam on headphones is used to dampen some frequencies and is much depending on how dense the foam is. But usually removing the foam means a change in the upper and lower frequencies.

[DalekDoc]

Nice mod.. so what kind of difference did you notice in the sound signature..? 

Also.. Seinfeld fan..?

[Art Vandelay]

Nice mod.. so what kind of difference did you notice in the sound signature..? 

Also.. Seinfeld fan..?

I found that it made the sound more open. loud high pitched notes no longer sound as screechy. It also made the bass sound a little better. I'm not much of an audiophile, so it's hard to tell.

 

I found this explanation of their sound characteristics:

 

So how does it sound? Removing the black tape material gives the HD558 the boost in midrange that it didn’t have before. It’s almost similar to the HD598, except that the HD558 now has just a tad more midrange than the HD598. Just a tad more, and it’s probably better in my opinion. The two headphones now sound like they are the same model but offered in different color schemes!

He later says that the 598 and 558 don't sound the same.

http://www.headfonia.com/sennheisers-new-hd558-and-hd598/3/