The Beyerdynamic DT931 is a good sounding and comfortable to wear headphone. But it´s not perfect. Many people notice a somewhat overpresence of the top-end of the frequency spectrum. Altough this dimishes somewhat -after a burn-in period- it stays present. This is a small isue though, and I've also read of people actually liking these cans for it. What irritates almost everybody though, is the annoying coiled cord that is fitted as standard on this headphone. I have replaced this with a straight cord, and since I've seen several postings in different fora asking how to replace this cord, I've decided to make a small write-up with some images to help people replace the cable on their own Beyer.

Replacing the cord is actually a pretty simple and straightforward process, so -when done with some care- the headphone is in no danger of suffering some irreperable damage in the process

The first type of cable to replace the standard cord was a microphone cable, the Belden cable model 8413. This cable was recommended to me by Jan Meier, the same person I bought this headphone from.

This was a fairly heavy cable, but because of the way my audio equipment was positioned with respect to my listening position, this was no problem. But I've moved now, and this cable became almost as big a nuisance as the standard cable, so I went to the local electronics store and bought a smaller diameter shielded two conductor cable. Although I have no doubt that the Belden is way better, comfort in this case was more important.

Here are the 3 types of cable used. The top one is the Belden. I inserted the two wires for left and right in a large piece of heatshrinktubing. The middle one is the standard cable that comes with the headphone. The lowest is the cable I use now. Instead of putting the two cables in heatshrinktubing, I decided to glue them together using superglue (the cyanide stuff that sets in seconds and will glue your fingers together). You can also see the RCA connectors and the adapter cable I made. I made this, because I planned to make a headphone amp with seperate left and right grounds. I changed my mind about that and decided to mount the heaphone plug directly on the cable, leaving out the RCA section, which you can see in a later picture

Here's a view inside. To open the headphone, simply follow the procedure described in the small leaflet that came with your headphone.

This is a close up of how the new cable is connected. On the left you can see how the strain relief is recycled from the original cable. On the right you can see the added resistor and capacitor. A trick that is explained on the Meier Audio site, under the headphone tricks section. As you can see, the shielding is left unconnected. It is connected with a resistor to ground at the other end of the cable. This helps reduce noise being picked up by the cable.

On to the other side of the cable. This is the ground-resistor soldered onto the shielding.

Next step: I soldered the white ground wire to the resistor. I also put a small diameter heatshrinktubing around the white wire and the resistor. This prevents the resistor from causing a shortcircuit somewhere and also makes handling the wire and resistor easier, because later on they will have to soldered onto the base of the connector.

Here you can see the connector-end of the cable fully prepared. I included the connector for size reference. I surrounded the last 10cm of the cable with heatshrinktubing, to make it a little more stiff and to make sure that the two cables don't seperate. Also note the small piece of tape around one of the two red wires, this is for identification, just a hint :)

The cable soldered onto the Neutrik headphone plug. Please remember to slide the back of the connector onto the cable before you start soldering! That will save you from some major frustration! I used a 1mm piece of heatshrinktubing (like a small rubber band) to hold the two gound wires together while soldering them to the base of the connector. This worked pretty well, the wires are well soldered and I didn´t burn my fingers! It does need some cleaning, I did this after taking this picture. Solder is now nice and shiny...

The finished product!!

Someone asked how I did the "Y-split" at the headphone end of the cable. In this image you can see this a little clearer. I simply left the two cables "unglued" and put a 5 cm piece of heatshrink around the split to prevent any tear-out.