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I recently destroyed a pair of Sony's ( snapped the wire in the middle of the lead ), and while repairing them, I would recommend two additional fixes to anyone pulling apart headphones:

First, replace the old lead with a 3.5mm phono jack instead. This gives me a double pullout safety if I wander off from my player, let's me use different lengths, and ensures I always have an M-M with me if I want to plug my player into something else. My real reason of course was that the Sony leads are really hard to solder being hair thin, lacquered, and intertwined with some kind of non-conductive fiber for strength.

Second, a switch to remove the common ground between the L & R channel ( set it to float ) will provide weird effects, i.e. anything mixed equally across the left and right channel will be removed ( usually vocals ). I did this with a simple push toggle switch.

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