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Electronics => Repair => Topic started by: admiral_akmir on November 14, 2016, 03:18:20 pm

Title: Recabling headphones question
Post by: admiral_akmir on November 14, 2016, 03:18:20 pm
I've got a pair of DT770 pro and DT880 pro, and I'd like to recable both. I've looked up blog posts of people who have done this before, and I have some questions.

1) In one of the writeups, there was a warning not to overheat the terminals when desoldering the wires from the driver, or the driver could be destroyed. I'm wondering how big of a risk this is, as I've only seen mention of it once. There are a number of mod tutorials for those specific headphones, but none of the others seem to mention this risk when talking about soldering.

2) On a brief writeup on a different mod for a different pair of headphones, the required items included lead free solder. So far, all of the tutorials I've watched on soldering have been for PCB's, and either 60/40 or 63/37 were recommended. Is there some kind of special requirement when working with the connections in headphones or sound systems in general? Why lead free? They gave no explanation for this.
Title: Re: Recabling headphones question
Post by: Lightages on November 14, 2016, 08:20:10 pm
If you aren't experienced at soldering, then you need to practice first on other things that you don''t care about. Dave has done some videos on soldering. The type of soldering you need to think about is reflow soldering where you pre-tin both parts to be soldered and then join them with a bit of heat.

DO NOT USE lead free. Use normal solder as its melting point is lower and is is easier to get a good joint with lower heat.
Title: Re: Recabling headphones question
Post by: admiral_akmir on November 14, 2016, 08:56:31 pm
If you aren't experienced at soldering, then you need to practice first on other things that you don''t care about. Dave has done some videos on soldering. The type of soldering you need to think about is reflow soldering where you pre-tin both parts to be soldered and then join them with a bit of heat.

DO NOT USE lead free. Use normal solder as its melting point is lower and is is easier to get a good joint with lower heat.

I've got a couple of very low end Biostar boards that both started having various blue screens and failures within the same year. Looked at them, and they both have bad capacitors, so I was going to start by recapping those.

I looked up  reflow soldering, and pre tinning, and they seem like two separate things? All of the reflow stuff I've looked at involves solder paste and reflow ovens or heat pencils. I'm assuming you meant just to pre tin both like you said, and then quickly join them to form the joint, as opposed to holding the iron to the terminal, heating it up and letting the hot terminal melt the solder?
Title: Re: Recabling headphones question
Post by: Lightages on November 14, 2016, 09:10:50 pm
Reflow is a bad term on my part. Pre-tinning and then reheating (formerly reflowing) the parts together causes the least amount of heat soaking and damage.
Title: Re: Recabling headphones question
Post by: admiral_akmir on November 14, 2016, 09:11:38 pm
Reflow is a bad term on my part. Pre-tinning and then reheating (formerly reflowing) the parts together causes the least amount of heat soaking and damage.

Great, thanks for the tips.
Title: Re: Recabling headphones question
Post by: Rasz on November 15, 2016, 08:47:32 am
I've got a couple of very low end Biostar boards that both started having various blue screens and failures within the same year. Looked at them, and they both have bad capacitors, so I was going to start by recapping those.

again:
practice first on other things that you don''t care about