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
I find that the extra power it gives at least reduces the likelihood of distortion. As well as giving a nice level of clarity.
But for short runs, anything around 6-feet cables, there are no audible gains to be had from using balanced anything. It's only bragging rights, even if the only person you're bragging to is yourself. On-paper it looks interesting. But it's no better than the standard unbalanced headphone jack.
That said, I run risk of hypocrisy because I use a balanced-ready rig at home and exclusively use balanced on my Audeze LCD3s, I love it. But in this case balanced provides a valuable extra output when I'm switching between different headphones.
But in my own (unscientific) testing with friends, I have yet to meet anyone who can actually hear the difference between the balanced output or quarter-inch headphone jacks.
Like fancy cables, there are a lot of people project a quasi-religious faith that expensive peripherals included in their gear will bring significant gains in sound quality. I'm a skeptic.
It's not just me, Tom Nousaine was one of the great hi-fi writers from the pre-digital age who did a lot of interesting controlled tests on audiophiles, sound engineers and hobbyests alike. His A/B/X testing on variants of very high-end audio rigs were legendary. He basically concluded that audiophiles tend to overestimate improvements when "high-end" peripherals are added to a sound system.
One in particular test I found amusing was when he took two of the same Carver power amp, and on one of them he replaced the power LED indicator light, the standard was blue but on one of the amps he replaced it with a red LED. He asked a panel, that could only see the face of the two amps, to describe differences in sound between the two amps. The panel of audiophiles and hi-fi journalists and engineers included Bob Carver himself, designer of the amp being used in the test.
The audience claimed to hear distinct differences between the two amps that roughly corresponded to the colour of the LED. The red LED amp frequently described as warm, colourful. The blue - cool, analytical. The punchline being that they were the same amp!
He did many more of these controlled tests of psychoacoustics at a Michigan or Massachusetts audio club he belonged to.
I believe, as Nousaine did, that we project a lot of our perception of sound quality based on unconscious biases.
I'm not saying balanced is bad by any means, I just question whether you're getting any practical value from it on a very short run. But hey, if the option is available I think it's worth it - just cuz.