The Acrux of the Issue

These are my work headphones.

For some reason a few years back Google decided that just buying regular off-the-shelf headphones was for plebs, and instead decided to make their own to distribute to employees. I really don't know why. They also called them "Acrux". Again, I really don't know why.

This initiative didn't last, though, and these headphones are no longer available. What also didn't last is the vinyl on the ear pads.

Anyone who's owned a set of headphones will recognize this as a sign of the apocalypse; once it starts, it doesn't stop, and you'll be dealing with jet black dandruff until you either throw away the headphones and buy a new pair or...

... Buy a replacement set of ear pads. These are designed for the Bose QC35 whose ear pads have roughly the same shape and dimensions.

What isn't the same, though, is how the ear pads mount to the speaker cups. On the Acrux there's a set of 5 tabs that go through slots in a plastic ring around the edge of the ear pads, just snapping into place. On the replacement ear pads, though, there are no such slots.

Luckily the inner plastic ring just slips into place on the Acrux ear pads, and can be slipped out just as easily. It's also what the speaker cloth is attached to, and since the existing ones were in good shape, I'll be reusing them.

There's no little flap of fabric on the new ear pads to slip this plastic ring into, so I'll be resorting to a different technique to secure them.

Good 'ol VHB. Just need to measure out how much I'll need.

And split it down the middle since it's much wider than the plastic ring.

And then I need to get rid of the EVA gasket on the new ear pads, since the VHB won't stick to it.

It takes a little bit of coaxing to get the VHB to curve around the oval shape, but luckily it's pretty chewy stuff.

And once the red plastic is peeled off, I can stick it to the old ring.

And then it just snaps back into place.

Of course if the left ear pad is falling apart, the right ear pad will not be far behind. Plus having mismatched ear pads does really weird things to the audio quality between the two sides, so replacing both at once is the best idea on a number of fronts.

So after the second verse (same as the first) everything is refreshed and good as new... at least until the vinyl on the headband starts disintegrating.

The level of noise isolation did drop a little with the new ear pads, which is a bit of a bummer, but it's better than getting black vinyl flakes all over the place, and it'll tide me over for a little while longer before I just expense a new pair of non-Google-branded headphones to replace these.