Would the sound of the headphones be better if I put an additional speaker in each cup?
Would the sound of the headphones be better if I put an additional speaker in each cup?
I have some closed-back headphones that have poor sound. Is it possible to improve the sound of the headphones by installing additional speakers?
How much better can the sound of the headphones be if the cups are covered with soundproofing tape?
First, you're going to have to define what poor sound means to you. Modding your closed back headphones to add more speakers isn't going to make them sound better, but probably worse.
The best way to get better sound is to replace your headphones with better headphones, or to use a better source when playing music. Even better headphones aren't going to improve the quality of music if you're playing lossy Mp3s.
If your headphones are crappy, a better source won't really help. It's not an or here, headphones make most of the difference. Only decent headphones will appreciably benefit from a good source.
MP3 isn't ideal but, unless you have rather good headphones, 320kbit/s MP3 is pretty damn near transparent.
IIRC 192 kbps is about where MP3s get good enough that the vast majority of people can't tell any difference from an uncompressed recording in ideal conditions. I've personally never noticed any loss of quality at 128 kpbs.
Everything about a headphone design influences its sound, not just the driver. If your headphones are crappy, chances are that changing out the driver won't help much, even if that was feasible which it is likely not.
Don't listen to these chumps. More is always better with speakers. I wear my headphones over my ear buds and sync them up. It sounds amazing and everyone says I am the bomb.
I just came here to remind you that you are the bomb
You're the bomb bro
Half the battle with headphones tends to be isolation. If you have decent sounding speakers but bad isolation you have mediocre at best headphones. Typically replacing the ear cups can be an option but adding speakers likely won't yield additional quality. Unfortunately if the speakers that already are in the headphones aren't up to snuff there won't be a whole lot you can do. It's important to make sure we're talking about the actual headphones though and not the audio amplifier or the source audio.
Short of just getting new cans because the speakers are just that bad, I think you'll be better off enhancing the sound source instead (EQ, DAC, etc.)
This is the best answer here, a lot of speakers, headphones, earbuds, etc can be improved significantly with an equalizer. If you don't know or don't want to understand the equalizer, your headphones might be supported by Auto EQ. Find your model of headphone in the database and use the premade EQ profile, designed to simulate the Harman target as closely as possible (in short the Harman target is theoretically the "best sound").
Why are you trying to get an answer via an internet forum instead of in the obvious way?