Grado Single Cable Mod Guide
Tags: DIY, Soldering, Headphones, Grado, Audio

After 3 weeks of looking at designs and playing around with the receiver more, I came to the conclusion that my main goal would be to just figure out a way to add a 3.5mm port to the left side, so that I could attach a 3.5mm cable whenever I wanted, and use the short 3.5mm male-to-male cable that came with the receiver if I wanted to use the Sr60i’s as a pair of BT headphones. I was pumped up, I had just received a new spool of tin and my iron had just heated up.

First step, removing the drivers from the cups.

The drivers are held with hot glue, so you will need a hair dryer for this part.

For this phase, remove the L and R phones from their swivel holders. Next, place them into a heat insulator (I used a cardboard box lined with bubble wrap) and heat them up with a hair dryer for about a minute. Don’t go ham on them, as the thin grill can easily melt with excess heat. Once the rubber covering on the wires go floppy and look like they are gonna melt, congratulations, its hot enough. Now, grab on to the ridge that the ear foam holds on to and pull apart from the outer casing (the one with the grill and all the branding). It should come apart relatively easily, otherwise you’ll need some more gentle heating.

Once you have two drivers separated, you will notice the R driver has a white/blue wire whereas the L driver has a red/blue wire. By process of elimination, one can determine that the blue is ground and the other two respectively are the live wires for either side.

Tldr;

WHITE — RIGHT Live wire

RED — LEFT live wire

BLUE — COMMON ground wire

These colors will be important to note, as we will have to solder the appropriate wire to the correct pin on our 3.5mm female port later.

The right cable is NOT long enough to reach the left

With my design, I aim to have the removable 3.5mm cable on the left side as that suited me, but if you want to do it on the right side, that’s no issue as well (You’re a monster) but you’ll just have to be aware that the instructions till the end will now be based on my Left biased design. DIY person - beware!

So, I started my measuring out the right side cable that I cut from the “Y-split” from the original thiCC cable. It was not long enough, and I needed lots more seeing there also has to me some slack to allow for height adjustments for the individual drivers. Since, the 3.5mm female port will be on the left, the left driver will not require much length, so I soldered on about 8 cm of excess cable from the left to extend the right one. By the end, I found that this was the perfect length and I didn’t require any more adjustments. Once that was done, you will now have to thread the cable through the headband onto the other side. The Grado’s make it easy in this case, as all the parts from the headband can be removed, and once you remove the plastic L & R indicators, you will notice there is a hole at the tip of the metal band. What I did was to take the now elongated right cable and thread the white/blue cable through the hole and jimmy it to the other side. It worked surprisingly well. I also tried just treading it with no guide, and that worked too, but took way more time.