repairing headphones

[SAVAGE-0]

Anyone ever do this?

I have bose headphones that are obviously way too expensive and from what i hear all tend to break around the 1.5-2 year age... go bose!  they're awesome though, and al lthats broken is the wires near jack... even with good care, time in the pocket is time being smushed the wrong way apparently. The left one has been going for weeks and finally is totally dead, unless heald in the exact right spot, and now the right is being finnicky.

So I'm going to radioshack and buying a new 3.5mm jack... not really sure what I'm doin, but I'm tech savvy enough to give it a shot.  any tips/ things I should know?  would you use solder? - most have screws from what I see, so it seems un necessary - and I'm a horrible soldererer.

[copulatingduck]

soldering will just make your cable fat, unattractive, and inflexible (then again, I'm bad at soldering too). I'd avoid it if I could

[Kirby]

The cable will have very little shielding, cut through the insulation carefully. The best way is to carve it off the long way down the cable 1st until you determine how thick the insulation is, that way you can avoid even nicking the shielding.


Use a multimeter to determine polarity of the cable, some companies will have two conductors inside some sort of dielectric, a lot will have only one conductor and use the shielding of the wire as the second conductor, so start this step as soon as you get the 1st bit of insulation off.


You'll need to solder the wire unless you want your <insert portable player> to kill it's battery quicker (we all know our electrical theory here, riiiiight?), and if you bought a good set of Bose I'm assuming you're concerned about the audio quality too...


When soldering stranded wire, in my personal experience the best way is to not twist the ends together, but get all the strands facing straight outward and then mesh the 2 open ends of cable together carefully so the strands mesh all smooth together, this way you can apply solder to a much smaller cross section of the cable, achieve a stronger junction and have a much smaller rigid portion of the cable.



When you're starting to solder stranded wires together, the best way (again in my experience, but I only solder stuff for a living*) is to put the tip of the iron onto the wires, and apply just a little bit of solder to where the iron is touching the wire, that'll heat up for a sec then get sucked into the wire, then from there you just keep slowly feeding the solder into the wire while the wire sucks it up, never moving the iron until you've got about 50% of the solder into the wire you're planning on putting in. Then stop adding solder and use the iron to 'push' the solder up and down the strands a little bit, and you're done. Don't go back and add the other 50% of the solder you were planning on putting in, because that was too much.

Honestly if you want to see wtf I mean by all that I can make a little Kirby's how-to solder shit like a pro video @ work and upload it before you go on this venture, I'm not trying to sound like an ego-bag or anything but I'm good @ what I do and I've done audio cables before, and if you don't get it right you'll end up with a crappy sounding set of headphonez, I learned the hard way on a good set of Sennheiser headphones.



* Shameless plug of my shit here

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