Several months back I was hanging out with Tyson. His daughter Kira owns a pair of Beyerdynamic Custom One Pro headphones. At the age of 13, she has become quite the music lover (and budding audiophile!), particularly fond of BTS. A very nice pair of headphones especially for a beginner set of cans. Great bass and very nice definition throughout the rest of the spectrum. She mostly uses them for listening to music via her iPad. I thought they were so good maybe I should make a cable for them to bring them to the next level.
This entire project was intriguing to me, I wanted to make something custom and unique for her yet also it was a great opportunity for me to beta test some ideas I had. For Kira’s cord I decided to forgo using nylon and decided on using rayon silk (took 3 times longer than usual to get to work, but doggone it I made it happen!). The other issue was that the Custom One Pros are a single sided connector with a proprietary notch out. Any way, With some tool work and a bit of trial and error, this is what I came up with:
Used my Sony WH-1000XM3 noise cancelling cans to test.
Check out the silk interior:
Beta test failure! So my idea to protect the connector failed! A wire broke off at the solder point, so in essence this design not only didn’t work, it exasperated the problem! They sent the cable back to me just in time, I’ll go into more detail about it in a separate thread, but I just got my custom connectors in, here’s a sneak peek of the new design. It will be standard on all IEM cables and optional on my yet-to-be-released new top of the line headphone cables.
Finalized version with the new connector:
In the end, I think this photo of Kira hearing the cable for the first time best expresses why I enjoy making custom equipment.
Kira and Tyson, thank you for this awesome story! I had a blast making this cable for her and find it quite impressive how keen she is when it comes to describing the sound quality!