Hifiman HE-6

Are the metal flakes attached to the magnets and metal grill only? If they are stuck to the diaphragm that could be trickier because of higher risk to pierce or tear. Also the liability... HE6 is not cheap. Cutting off the resistors and replacing the wire would be easy enough. But what if removing the resistors results in significant imbalance?

 

Those flakes look very challenging to get out it's like they're stuck to the headphone's magnet but on the side that faces the diaphragm, in a perfect world they would get removed but I would be happy with just getting rid of the resistors.

I would not consider the headphones very functional in their current state like I said the resistors can get pretty hot and the whole set up is very sketchy to me.

The guy who sold them to me said that Hifiman put those big-ass resistors in there because he kept sending them back for repair after blowing out the headphone's drivers repeatedly and they said they had enough of it.

I think for that reason I hadn't really considered reaching out to Hifiman directly but I think I may as well try that, I'm not really sure I believe that story anyway.

UPDATE: Hifiman said the resistors do not affect the functionality and that there is nothing they can do. They are not willing to remove them and they don't have stock to change drivers.

I would really like to pay someone to go through this testing process:

1) listen to headphones how they are now, then remove the resistors and see how things change/ if any driver imbalances appear

2) if everything is fine at that point then great, if there is some sort of problem that appears, then measure the impedance of the resistors, and maybe get a replacement pair of resistors that are the same rating?

3) shrink wrap the resistors so it looks much nicer, and no more chances of flaking crap, then reinstall them so things go back to the way they were before.

If you guys think this is a simple process I would consider trying it myself as well I am just unsure of how risky a noob doing it would be

 

Even for a cheap resistor, that looks like a fair bit of heat damage happening there. I don't think a normal audio signal would do that. From the story of repeated failures, my gut feeling is the original owner's amp had a fair bit of DC on the output which was cooking the drivers.

 

Agreed. That big resistor looks cooked. Hopefully the drivers are OK.

 

Updated my post with Hifiman response, also Merry Christmas!