Replacing a blown ATH-M50 driver - Walkthrough with pics

[schwat]

One of my friends recently had a driver go out on his ATH-M50 headphones. Since they're about 5 years old they are well out of warranty so he would have to pay to send them to Audio-Technica for repair. Well I e-mailed their tech support to see if they sold replacement drivers & turns out they do. It only cost me $24 ($20 + $4 shipping) to get a driver mailed to me. I was very impressed with the speedy response (literally less than 2 minutes) to my e-mail inquiry & I had a driver in my hands within 3 days of contacting them.

 

Audio-Technica contact info for parts in the US: PARTS @ ATUS.com  (had to add spaces, forum doesn't like e-mail addresses)

 

 

So I figured since I'm taking these apart & fixing them I might as well take pictures and document how to do it in case it will help anybody else so here goes.

 

 

Troubleshooting/Determining the problem: 

 

So first step was figuring out what the problem is. The symptoms my friend had were no sound in the left ear but still had sound in the right ear. First step was to determine if the cable was at fault or if it was the driver.

 

To do this I had to crack open the headphones to get to the cable termination point.

 

Fully assembled:

 

Removed the ear pad to expose the plastic underneath. Here we see 4 screws that need to be removed to get to the driver.

 

 

After removing the face plate we see this manifold which has 3 screws holding the driver in place which needs to be removed.

 

We can also finally access our cable termination points. On the right we have the 3 points where the input cable is terminated & on the left we have the small black cable that runs underneath the headband over to the right driver. 

 

 

Quick look at the pinout for a headphone cable plug for reference. We're going to first probe from the plug to the breakout point to ensure our cable is intact. Don't have any pictures of this but just put your DMM in Ohms mode & measure from the 3 points on the plug to the corresponding points on the driver. They should all measure ~1 ohm.:

 

 

Now that we have determined that our cable is still good lets confirm the driver is bad by measuring its resistance. 

 

First we measure our known good driver. We get 35.5 ohms which is pretty close to the nominal impedance, so far so good.

 

 

Next we measure our suspected bad driver. Here we see an open circuit indicating that this is indeed the source of our problem:

 

 

 

Removal & replacement:

 

 

To finish removing the driver we just apply a bit of force & it pops right out of the back of the face plate. Make note of the orientation & how the wires must run through that manifold before you disconnect everything. The final step in removing it is to de-solder the 5 wires.

 

 

 

Prior to installation we do a sanity check of our new driver to make sure it measures good. No point in replacing a bad driver with another bad driver. Here we get a measurement of 32.6 ohms which indicates a good driver. 

 

 

 

All that's left is to re-connect the wires. After soldering the driver on it is also a good idea to go ahead & plug the headphones in & make sure they work before replacing the screws. 

 

This pic from earlier is actually of the replaced driver. I forgot to take pictures during initial dis-assembly so I took pics during re-assembly. But you can see I have kept the insulation short & made sure to solder down all the exposed copper wire so it does not have any room to play. Just make sure none of the wires can move & short into the other wires. 

 

 

 

Final check:

 

Final measurements from the connector just to triple-check work after completing repairs.

 

Right channel: 

 

 

Left channel:

 

[Flight1sim]

wow

[Guest]

^ That cat is happy.

[ShearMe]

Very nice!