AKG N60NC headphones are a really nice set of on-ear, noise cancelling headphones, which sound great and are comfortable to wear for long periods. They are getting a bit long in the tooth now and one problem mine have always had is poor (and getting poorer all the time) battery life.
So this is a quick visual guide for anyone interested in prolonging the life of these headphones by replacing the battery, which turns out to be easier than you’d imagine. You will need a soldering iron for this, a small Philips screwdriver, and NERVES OF STEEL.
Fine, you don’t really need nerves of steel.
Let’s Take This Thing Apart
The battery sits in the earphone where the charging port is located. To get to it first you need to remove the padding, which is held in only with an elastic skirt that slots into a channel that goes around the earpiece.
Removing the pad reveals a plastic cover which is held in place with 4 small Philips screws. (or maybe pozidriv? I don’t know). Before you remove these it’s worth remembering the orientation of the cover for when you put it back.
You can’t take the plastic cover off completely because the main driver is attached to it and is wired to the PCB inside the earpiece, so we have to work with this just pulled over to one side. And once we do that you can see the battery in it’s little compartment.
So there’s a few things worth noting here. First, if you try to pull the battery out you’ll find it’s stuck down pretty good with an adhesive pad on the underside. I eased it out gently so the pad stayed in place ready for the new battery. If you can avoid it, you don’t really want to remove the adhesive pad because then the battery will rattle around in the headphones. Second, the three battery wires — white, black and red — are not only soldered to the PCB but the solder pads are then covered in hot glue which adds to the annoyance factor of getting it out.
So the next step is easing the old battery off the sicky pad and desoldering the wires from the battery to the PCB. In my case I used a relatively cool iron to both melt the glue and desolder the wires. Then I had to do a bit of a clean up around the solder pads gently scraping away with a spudger to remove a bunch of residual glue. It’s probably best to avoid the temptation to scrape the glue away with a screwdriver blade or other metal object here as the PCB tracks are exposed and liable to get mashed.
Interestingly, when I took the old battery out instead of a nice flat square it was bulging and warped and looked ready to split open. I had been getting 2 hours or so of battery life from these headphones (down from about 12 originally) and looking at the state of this battery, I was about three double-albums away from the thing blowing up and taking half my head with it. Probably.
Once the battery is out and the PCB cleaned up we’re ready to put a new battery in.
Battery Choice
Battery choice was a bit of a journey, which I’m happy to bore you with here. If we look at the original battery specs (see the photo further back) it’s a 610 mAh, 3.7v battery, part number GSP753030. You can find that part from specialist suppliers if you hunt around. But if I’m honest I wanted an upgrade on the original so I kept looking.
However, if you search on ebay for a replacement battery for N60NC you come up with a lot of batteries but most of them actually have lower capacities than the original. For instance, here’s the top listing today for replacement “Premium Cell AKG N60 NC battery”:
This battery above is a wretched 320 mAh — pretty much half the capacity of the original…. an outrage, I think you’ll agree.
What I wanted to find was a battery that would fit the rather tight battery slot in the headphones, had the right voltage, right wiring (three wires, not two) and with higher capacity than the original. What I came up with was this battery below. Part number GSP902540, it’s supposed to be for an AKG N700NC, has 700mAh capacity and fits perfectly into the slot vacated by the old battery.
Putting it all Back Together
I won’t go through putting it back together step by step: it’s basically the reverse of the above steps. In the new battery the white wire (sometimes the yellow wire on some batteries) goes to the pin marked NTC, while the red and black go to B+ and B- respectively as you’d imagine. It was a bit of a fiddly resolder operation as the pins are small and close together and I’m a klutz but it worked out fine in the end.
You can see from the above that I had to experiment with how to tuck the extra wire length from the battery so that it allowed the earpiece to go back together without blocking the screw hole, but after a couple of attempts it went back together fine and holds in great with no rattling or movement.
Finally
With everything back together I plugged it in and sure enough the charging light came on and all was well. On a full charge I got about 15 hours life from the headphones, which I think will improve after a few cycles, and it’s way better than the 2 hours I was getting before. For about £14 for a new battery and an hour or so of futzing around it’s a great result and one less thing saved from landfill.
