Velour ear cushions

[Teilkasko]

I would like to know whether someone has found a way to replace the included vegan leather ear cushions/ear pads with custom velour ones. I am interested in the Fairbuds XL but had personally bad experiences with vegan leather earpad headphones in the past, especially when wearing them over longer time.

[PSZ]

I haven’t done anything with FairBuds, and this isn’t much of a lead to follow, but Wicked Cushions did decent work for me on replacements for a pair of Sony headphones. I’m not shocked they don’t list the FairBuds in their standard products, but they might have some recommendations if you reached out to them.

The Best Replacement Ear Pads On Earth - Wicked Cushions

[cd99]

To the OP and anyone else looking, these earpads from Aliexpress are pretty good:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005612104027.html

I had to pry open the plastic housing and tear out the original pads but the pads were already coming off after less than a year. This is the end result:

[Samael]

+1
I would love to buy velour ear cushions. I wonder how the company will approach this, but it will probably be faster to start production on our own or buy something that could fit from our Asian friends.

[Samael]

Could you tell me how you replaced the ear pads? When I took off the ear cup, I saw that four screws held together a plastic frame. After unscrewing the screws, it is not visible that the plastic frame wants to split into two parts.

[cd99]

The two parts of the plastic frame for the earpads are glued together and so are the pads to the plastic frame. You have to remove the 4 screws, and then pry the plastic apart.

(this was a lot of work but thankfully the plastic was pliable enough to withstand some amount of flexing and the dents are hidden by the new padding)

You will then have to tear the skin of the padding, which has been glued in

Wrap the padding of the new one on the inner plastic and clamp it with the outer plastic.

Once you’ve done that, screw back in the 4 screws and you’re ready to go.

(photos from when I was doing the disassembly back in March)

[cd99]

Adding photos of the headphones now, 3 months after the assembly:

1. The pads have held on to the frame remarkably well(or maybe the frame has held on to the pads). I don’t store this headphone in a case anymore when traveling, so it does get some amount of abuse (can replace the earpads now for less than $5)
2. The cloth side of the earpads are fraying a little from the part where it touches my shaved sideburns (basically the short, prickly hairs are causing some wear)
3. For the price I paid for the earpads, they are absolutely a great bargain and I rate the comfort higher (in hours I can wear it). Also, the original earpads started tearing off in this timeframe anyway.
4. I wish they would sell the frames without the glue as in my view their version is not durable at all. I’m coming from a Sony WH100XM2 model, and other than the wear to the leather the pads had never come off the pad housing in the >5 years I had it.

Lastly, I am not an audiophile, so I can not make any judgements on the change in audio quality. Changing the pads doesn’t seem to noticeably affect the audio quality or noise cancellation for me. If you get full cloth pads from the same vendor, this will affect noise cancellation greatly.