Modding the Dekoni Blue ("Arch-Mod5"). Streaming audio: Apple Music to be "true hi-res lossless" stereo with multichannel (Atmos) in June.

A couple weeks back, I measured the Dekoni Blue headphone which as I noted, is itself a "modded" Fostex T50RP Mk 3 planar-magnetic (aka "Regular Phase", aka "isodynamic") headphone. It would be completely remiss of me if in a review/discussion of the Dekoni/Fostex I were not to spend some time talking about modding!

Modding has an very long tradition in the 'head-fi' world and I think it's been generally recognized that the Fostex headphones are the classic headphones to perform surgeries on. Much of what I'll be talking about here will be nothing new to those deep into this stuff already. For more on modding, check out this Headphonesty article for a background.

To start, as always, we need a plan and a "vision". As I mentioned in the last article, the Dekoni Blue sounds pretty good for the most part, so my job isn't to change the performance completely, but to rather refine what is there. If a headphone sound highly objectionable, one should really just move on and buy something else! Let's review the measurements I published last time for the Dekoni Blue with the supplied earpads and see what we can try...

MUSINGS: Thoughts on audio device "modding" (eg. a tube modded Oppo BDP-105). [New Oppo UDP-205 firmware out with MQA USB-B...]

Couldn't resist the similarity :-). I'm sure the sonic output of both devices have been affected by the modifications! Notice that this Oppo is also sitting on a "Base" device that IMO is very much of the Dubiousness Class A variety...

Have a seat and let me tell you a tale, my friends. A number of years ago (summer 2013), around the time I started this blog, I had the opportunity to check out an interesting device that a friend had just received... It was a "tube modded" Oppo BDP-105 Blu-Ray player.

One afternoon, I went over to this friend's house to have a listen to this brand new device. He obviously spent quite a bit of money on it. The BDP-105 at that time was new and had an MSRP of US$1200. He is clearly an enthusiast so he "drop shipped" an unopened brand new player to the mod-shop and it came back to him with tube sockets for the analogue stage along with a fancy new external power supply. As you would expect, the modding itself being laborious, hand-assembled, and using premium parts was rather costly - about twice the price of the Oppo.

That afternoon, I had the opportunity to hook up my old test kit (with the Creative E-MU 0404 ADC) to the device to grab a few measurements. Since another friend already had a stock BDP-105 for me to listen to and measure, it allowed me to compare the results...