How to Replace the Ear Pads on Your Headphones
If you want your gaming peripherals to last, you need to make sure that you spend enough time cleaning them. This applies to mice, keyboards, mousepads, and headphones.
The better you take care of them, the longer they will serve you and the better your experience will be.
Today we will focus on how to clean/maintain your gaming or studio headphones and specifically we will talk about swapping your ear pads.
Why Swapping Your Ear Pads Matters
You see, when it comes to cleaning a pair of headphones there is not much you need to do. As long as you don’t physically break them, they should work properly. The only exception to this is the earpads that come in contact with your head a lot.
With time the headphone earpads become unable to maintain their shape and properly isolate sound, become grimy and old-looking, and might influence how your headphones sound.
As you can see aside from aesthetic reasons, there are also practical reasons why swapping your ear pads is important.
Swapping your earpads also makes a lot more sense money-wise since instead of buying a whole new pair of headphones which can be pretty costly, you are spending 10-20$ to simply change the earpads and get that new premium feel.
Because of this, we would encourage you to not just throw away your old pair of headphones because they look and sound old, instead try to swap out the old earpads and give them a try once more.
Unless the headphone is actually defective there is no real reason to not just continue using them with a new set of fresh pads.
You should be able to swap pads on all categories of headphones, including budget, medium-range, and studio headphones.
How to Swap Your Ear Pads
First of all, you want to do some research and make sure that your headphones do support replaceable earpads. Sometimes the pads are glued onto the frame of the headphones and that, unfortunately, means your chances of changing them are slim to none.
If you find that your headphones can have their ear pads replaced then it is time to purchase a replacement pair of ear pads that will work with your headphones. To do this properly you can search for the model of headphones, and then find out the part number for the ear pads that they use.
Once you figured out the part number of your headphone’s ear pads, you can just Google that part and purchase it from the most convenient place.
When you finally have your replacement earpads you can start the actual process of changing them out.
99% of the time all you have to do is pull the old pads off (they should come off with a little bit of force) and squeeze the new headphone pads in. There will either be a clicking mechanism or some sort of edge onto which the pads will clip on.
Overall a very simple process that takes less than a minute!
Final Advice
There are different types of headphone earpads out there that behave differently on your head and change the sound signature of the headphone.
The most common earpads are leather pads which have the downside of becoming quite sticky and sweaty but preserve a lot of the natural bass from the headphone.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have the velour earpads that trap a lot less heat and are easier to wear for a long time, but which do not work as well for sound isolation.
You will often find that leather pads are used for closed-back headphones and velour earpads are used for open-back headphones.
Depending on which type of headphones you have you should perhaps experiment and see what you like best between leather and velour pads, otherwise, you should use the same type of materials as the original earpads.
The prices of the earpads differ and there are also more expensive custom pads like Wicked Cushions and Brainwavzaudio, but you should only concern yourself with these if you already know a bit about your preferred audio setup.