Powerful source kills IEMs?

[sovesky]

Hi,


This issue has been haunting my mind lately.

In recent weeks I connected my Head-Direct RE0 to my computer for some music and suddenly the left ear piece volume, diminishes abruptly!
I disconnected the IEM's and let them rest for a couple of hours. Then I connected then to my rockboxed sansa fuze and everything was fine...

The same happened recently to a friend of mine who connected his Senn CX300 II to his laptop and the left ear piece volume also decreased in a large amount.

Is this normal? We've been using those IEMs for months and nothing ever happened to them until we connected them to our computers.

P.S - My old Sennheiser HD477 cans, died!

[CrowdAds]

[WalkGood]

This doesn’t seem right to me, are you sure the jack was in all the way? I don’t know what the 3.5mm headphone jack out specs are for most computer, but I’ve used numerous iem’s, cx300 included and various full size headphones from numerous computers without issue. Although I can state that most if not all onboard sound cards don’t do justice compared to a proper sound card or DAC/amp.

[sovesky]

Then maybe it was just pure bad luck.

Nevertheless I find it odd that those IEM's after a while, normalize their volume level.

[sYlt]

Unless you use the volume at the max level or near it, I don't think there's a problem with 'powerful sources'. When I connect my IEMs to the computer I usually lower the system volume to around 6 out of 100 or so.

[sovesky]

Me too. Should the fact that I'm using an onboard sound card have any effect in this situation? Like some sort of voltage flutuation or something... I don't understand anything about this kind of things, therefore I may be writing some sort of absurd in this matter.

P.S - sYlt, nice to find someone from my home city, on Abi.

[sYlt]

I would say it was just an unfortunate event, you could always try to connect it again on your computer and see if it happens again, in that case there would be a chance of permanent damage so it's up to you.

And hey there neighbour! =)

[Jack4L]

Sounds like your headphone jack just slightly pushed out of the socket, maybe you tugged on it slightly by accident right before it happened. Since the tip of a headphone jack is the left side channel, its the first channel to go out when you pull a headphone jack out. Well it might depend on the socket, just tried on my Audiofire and its the right side channel that goes first

[sovesky]

Today I connected my RE0 again, and watched a movie for 2 hours. Nothing relevant happened.

IEM world is pure dark magic to me.

Thank you all, for the provided help.