What's wrong with my headphones?

Alan Bolte · Post by **Alan Bolte** » 2005-04-02 03:28pm

Alright, so I'm sitting here on SDnet, I get up to go talk to my sister a moment, I come back, and my right ear is dead. I fiddle with the cable a bit. Comes back sometimes, sometimes not. It's one of those with a little box along the wire that can do noise cancellation if you put a battery in and flip a switch, so that means there's four points where the wire goes into a hard connection. the wire only goes into one ear; the other ear is connected through the headphones themselves. I think I've narrowed it down to the length of wire between the headphones and the box. The trouble is this: If I hold the connection to the headphones as still as I can while I have no sound in the right ear, and fiddle with the connection to the box. Sound comes back if I hold the wire right. I do the opposite for the connection to the headphones, and get exactly the same result. At this point, I'm thinking, "WTF?," because it seems the connection has to be broken in two locations for there to be a problem, rather than just one. If I have sound, and hold one connection steady, no amount of twisting and moving of the other connection will turn the sound off. So I wonder if maybe the problem is along the wire, so I hold the wire just next to the connection to the box, and move the wire around in various places. No effect. I then hold the wire just a little farther along, and fiddle with the connection to the box. We get signal.

Also, does it matter? Is this the sort of thing that can be easily fixed, or do I just have to buy new ones, despite the fact that these are fairly nice and less than four months old?

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2005-04-02 07:18pm

It could be properly broken - my nice 'phones died like that after my soundcard decided to overvolt and burn out the relay in the headphones from one side to the other (it had the same arrangement as yours, with the cable going in only one side).

Alan Bolte · Post by **Alan Bolte** » 2005-04-02 09:06pm

I'm not sure I understand... why would I be getting sound when I fiddle with the wire? I don't know much about electronics. Oh well, it works fine if I just wrap the cord around the headphones in a position that gets sound.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2005-04-03 12:59am

I honestly never worked out what was wrong with mine, but the 'far' phone (the one opposite the headphone cable) became fuzzy, then intermittent, then stopped working entirely. It was slow enough that I didn't see it as a problem until it was totally fucked. Do you always use it on the same source?

Alan Bolte · Post by **Alan Bolte** » 2005-04-03 01:46am

Stark wrote:Do you always use it on the same source?

I might have used it with a CD player at one point, but I can't remember the last time it wasn't hooked to my computer. Why?

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman · Post by **Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman** » 2005-04-03 03:02am

Alan Bolte wrote:I'm not sure I understand... why would I be getting sound when I fiddle with the wire? I don't know much about electronics. Oh well, it works fine if I just wrap the cord around the headphones in a position that gets sound.

I suspect the wire has been partially torn-off inside; that's why you got the sound when fiddling with your pen... I mean the wire. Is it an expensive headphones, or just el-cheapo one? In former case, you may want to get someone to re-solder it, or replace the entire wire. In the case of cheap headphone just get out and buy another one.

Alan Bolte · Post by **Alan Bolte** » 2005-04-03 05:03pm

Is there a way to tell where the break is without just stripping the whole wire? I'd rather repair it than have to replace it, if that's not to difficult to do. Could I just strip a small section, and then pull, and have the wire slide out of the plastic? End result would be only two small areas stripped, just not sure that would work. I do think I know where it is, but I wouldn't want to mess this up because I know nothing of electronics.

Shadowhawk · Post by **Shadowhawk** » 2005-04-05 10:53pm

Alan Bolte wrote:Is there a way to tell where the break is without just stripping the whole wire? I'd rather repair it than have to replace it, if that's not to difficult to do. Could I just strip a small section, and then pull, and have the wire slide out of the plastic? End result would be only two small areas stripped, just not sure that would work. I do think I know where it is, but I wouldn't want to mess this up because I know nothing of electronics.

The reason it's cutting out is because the connection is being broken somewhere.

First thing you should do is just open up the ear-cup and check all the solder connections.
Chances are, you won't be able to pull the wire out of the sheath; it's far too tight a fit and there's too much friction. You'd probably just damage it further.

If it's not a solder connection, and is a break in the wire, first thing is to look for folds, crimps, or damaged areas in the wire. Those would be the obvious places the wire would be damaged. If the sheath looks intact, the best thing to do is to tweak the wire every few inches until you find the point where it cuts the sound out.
That's what I did for a pair of headphones at work; I discovered the wire heading from the left cup to the right cup had been damaged, so I just replaced it all with some wire scavenged from some Cat5. It's a lot stiffer than the original wire, but it works.