I've mentioned the Tari mod in a few posts lately, and I've been flooded with a deluge of inquiries since.  I told people to hold tight as everything would be spelled out soon enough, and today I finally found some time to lay it out.


Like the "stepping-stone" mods it is based on (Anax mod, Jazz mod, etc) this mod is simple enough that anyone can do it, cheap enough that anyone can afford it (provided they already have the headphones,) and performed with materials you can pick up at your local store.


First, the issue.  The HD800 is a very polarizing headphone.  Your average forum will have users who love 'em and those who hate 'em, and this is usually the problems they have in their stock form - reflections, peaks in the treble, and brightness in general.  This can sound like absolute garbage with a lot of music.  That is not acceptable for a headphone with this level of technical prowess, so 'a modding I went.


Every modder worth their salt has certain "go-to" materials or procedures they use when first trying to mod something - something that usually has a very different application but they have found to be very effective in headphone modding - damping, controlling backwaves, whatever it may be.  A good "secret sauce" material usually has properties that manage to tighten things up without making them sound muffled.


Up until this point, modders have had varying degrees of success with materials from creatology foam to putties.  I have found something that blows them all away, is night-and-day, hands-down, whatever the hyperbole you want to use - its that good.  It manages perfect neutrality while never sounding sterile, has endless resolution but is still great with lo-fi or hyper-compressed modern music, and is quite frankly an epiphany roughly on par with sliced bread.


So, without further ado, here is a pictorial (obligatory "sorry for the crappy pictures with artificial lighting" comment) of how to perform the Tari mod:





Start off with a set of HD800 headphones.  If you already have any mods inside the cups, you should remove them.





Here's a shot of the headphone, with pads and dust covers in.  The next logical step is to:





Take them out.  I take the dust covers out first, then the pads.





Here's the dust covers:





And here's the back of the  pads, including the plastic lip it uses to attach to the headphones - this is all just to make sure we get our lingo straight:





So again, we should be left with this:





An empty, unsullied, virgin headphone.  The next step is to grab the "secret sauce.":





While there may be other brands out there, I've found this brand to work superbly.


I first thought to use Sri Racha after realizing how much I was using it for my every day modding - I started off putting a bit in my Chinese food or on my Pizza, but it has slowly overtaken every other spice, sauce, herb, or root in my arsenal.  At this point my average bowl of cereal in the morning is two parts milk one part Sri R acha, and I'm not certain what food tastes like without it.  It just makes everything better. 


When I realized... well, how much better everything is with it, it hit me like a lightning bolt - these have to go in my headphones. 


Cue the next step:





Gently form a ring of Sri Racha around the driver.  This would have worked better had I transferred the Sri Racha from its bottle into a specialized squeezing tube, but for the purposes of illustration and as a DIY modification, straight out of the bottle will suffice.  Don't worry if it comes out a little unevenly - the reflections will be absorbed by the liquid and its uneven nature will actually cancel out the uneven FR (peaks and dips) of the headphone.


Here's a closer shot to give you more of an idea of how I went about this groundbreaking mod:





Needless to say, as Sri Racha is sort of liquid-y, make sure it doesn't come into contact with the driver/voice coil.  This is a risky mod, but the returns are well worth the risk.


Some mods say not to put the dust covers back on, but I have found it doesn't make a difference due to the huge difference the simple Tari mod already makes.  So put everything back on and your headphones should look like this:





To the rest of the world, an ordinary HD800.  But you and I know the secret sauce that went into it:





Next up:  Stax 009