Sennheiser PC37X randomly goes bad after disconnecting the cable ?
Greetings, Yesterday I was using my headset like normal with my macbook, just listening to music and on a call with people like usual, and the headset was perfectly fine. The stock wire that came with the headset is extremely long and yesterday it annoyed me very much that it kept getting tangled with itself, so I decided to see if the cable is replaceable. I pulled out the cable from the headset and saw the adapter, and looked online for a replacement. Upon plugging it back in, the audio sounded extremely muffled and washed out. Im not sure what I did wrong to make it mess up like that as I've always taken good care of it, ive had it for about 2 years and its always just been chilling on my desk, but anywho I thought the cable just went bad and ordered a replacement. The replacement came, and the issue is still persistant, so I am not sure what the issue is I've tried multiple different headsets and the issue is not with the port, and I also tried it with my windows laptop and...
Apr 23, 2024
After a ton of experimentation, I spent about $40 (CAD) to run audio from the TOSLINK optical connector on my motherboard to a FiiO TAISHAN-D03K DAC, into which I plugged the supplied 3.5 mm to 2x 1/4" TRS cables. The point of this is to ensure that there is no ground conductor between the PC and the independently grounded speakers. The speaker and DAC are now isolated from the noisy ground in the PC, and the hum is gone.
With these monitors and a pending headphone purchase, I'll have a good baseline for experimentation with better DACs (>95dB SNR on the TAISHAN objectively isn't great, and there may be other issues I'm not aware of yet), but since getting to this point involved a lot of frustration and restocking fees, I thought I should share this with the community to help any neophytes like myself. Good luck out there.