I think I must have stretched too far while wearing my headphones and stretched the mini jack connector; sound has started to work intermittently which isn’t great while trying to work on my RPM project. This afternoon I broke out the wire-stripper and soldering iron and attempted to splice together the red lead of the headphones and the jack from an old pair of (black) earbuds.
The process was complicated by three things:
- The headphones had three wires (blue, green and copper) while the ear buds turned out to have four (red, green and two coppers)
- The wires are flimsy and have a narrow nylon thread at their core, making it hard to follow advice to twist them together
- I’m out of practice at soldering
However, I did eventually manage it. I made the (correct) assumption that all the copper wires were earth ones and connected the one from the headphones to the two from the earbud jack. I also assumed (incorrectly) that the green wires should match so the blue and red ones should be joined and that’s how I soldered them after using fine sandpaper to remove most of the colour coating. Once I’d wrapped each joint with some electrical tape I tested and discovered that left and right were switched but I can always put the headphones on backwards when that might be important!
All in all, while not the prettiest of repair jobs, I think I’ve given the headphones a new lease of life; at least they work again for now.