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
Short version of the cable story: "I'd better say they sound better, even though they don't. Otherwise I'll feel like a fool for buying these cables".
Break-in period is right up there with the psycho-induced phenomenon of improved sound by changing cables. It's these same psycho-induced phenomena that have people believing that headphones that have low transparency along with high distortion and excessive driver coloration, such as the Sennheiser HD6XX series, are good headphones. What these headphones provide is "safety". Then, being human, "safety" gets translated to "good". But from the purely auditory sense their ability to accurately reproduce the recorded sounds in a clean, precise, and transparent way is in realty quite awful.
Here's a review (not mine) pulled from Amazon that helps explain further:
Break-in Period. Engineers can't risk designing product that depends on a break-in period. Too much uncertainty. When listening to headphones that have audible coloration the listener over time will minimize their perception to it. They will also adjust their perception to compensate for spectral imbalance. Some audiophiles are not aware that they are mistaking mental adaptation for a nonexistent brake-in period. In my evaluations I will temporarily adapt to the sound of a particular headphone model to determine how similar it is to or dissimilar it is from other headphone models in order to place it and others in the proper category.
Upgrade Cables. Upgrade cables do not improve sound quality. Not to the slightest degree. When I purchased a new Onkyo A-9050 integrated amplifier I needed to check it out after receiving it. However, I was currently enjoying my JR Transrotor headphone amplifier and was not in the mood to do so. When I did make the switch the Onkyo unit sounded lousy. I went back to the JR Transrotor unit and it also sounded lousy. So, what happened? My depth of perception dropped along with my mood. If one is excited about checking out a new product the opposite effect can happen. One's depth of perception is greatly affected by mood. I chose European karaoke music to do my evaluations for bass and overall sound because it was the music that I was interested in at the time. Therefore, I was able to up my perceptive depth and get into a zone for doing those evaluations. During my evaluations I had to be aware of my mood and degree of perceptive depth all the time. I repeated many evaluations on different days.