I can wear Sony’s flagship WH-1000XM5 wireless noise canceling headphones for up to three hours before I need a rest, but some folks find that after as few as 20 minutes, the headband creates a painful pressure point. If that’s been your experience and now you’re wondering if you’ll need to sell your $400 cans at a loss so you can buy a different model, I have a potential fix that could cost you less than two Starbucks Frappuccinos.
This clever hack was discovered by my neighbor, Garner. Garner’s the kind of guy that firmly believes there’s a fix out there for every problem, so he decided to do some Googling when his own set of XM5 started to bother him. He quickly found a Reddit thread that gave him exactly the solution he was looking for.
Reddit user CantPrintMe, who suffers from the same pain, created a 3D design for a set of small adapters that snap onto the XM5’s tubular headband sliders. The adapters have rectangular slots that are sized to accommodate a replacement headband for the SteelSeries Arctis 7 headphones — a $9 purchase on Amazon.
Once installed, you can alter the length of the Arctis headband to taste, but the trick is to make it smaller than the size of the XM5’s headband. That way, the Arctis headband works the same way as it would on an Arctis headset — distributing the weight of the headphones over the width of the new fabric, instead of the narrower ridge of factory memory foam.
Garner found he was even able to stow the XM5 in its travel case without needing to remove the adapters — a slight twist on their orientation let the case close just fine.
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CantPrintMe published their 3D model on makerworld under the username TinkerF with a creative commons license, which means it’s free to download as long as you aren’t using the files to print and sell the parts.
If you don’t own a printer, don’t despair. There are several online services that will 3D-print a file for you and ship the finished parts. Garner used one called xometry and spent about $18 CAD (about $13) total. That was in November 2024, so he can’t offer much feedback on how well the printed parts will hold up over time, but he’s thrilled with the result so far.
Have you found an affordable and easy fix for your own headphone or earbuds issues you’d like to share? Email me at scohen (at) digitaltrends.com.