The Headphone Saga

Part 1

The headphones I use is a converted headset. It was the kind of headset where you could detach the microphone. Usually devices would pick it up as a pair of headphones when the microphone was not attached. However a phone I used to own did not. I hat to permanently hard-wire the microphone line to ground so I could use it to listen to music.

So a few days ago, the cable broke. Kinda expected after almost a decade of pretty much daily usage.

A pretty simple repair: Find a decent replacement cable, attach one end to the headphones, attach the other end to a DIY TRS jack. I used a cheapo 2€ one, which had a pretty fancy metallic design. I quite liked it. Until it broke three days later.

What to do now? From a pragmatic point of view, I had two options. Either get a new DIY TRS jack, a more expensive one this time, and hope the old one broke because it was cheap, or decide that DIY TRS jacks are inherently not trustworthy, solder a mini-XLR connector to the wire and buy some random mini-XLR to TRS cable.

Naturally I decided to do both.

I planned to shorten the cable to roughly thirty centimeters, attach the mini-XLR connector and build my own mini-XLR to TRS adaptor cable out of the leftovers. Totally overly complicated, but it would have provided a good comparison between DIY mini-XLR connector and higher tier DIY TRS jack quality, providing a reference for future projects. And if the TRS jack failed, I could always fall back to the pure mini-XLR idea and just buy an adaptor cable. It must also be mentioned that mini-XLR connectors are pretty fancy and increase the "coolness"-factor of the headphones considerably. So of course I was completely sold on this idea.

A few days later, both the DIY TRS jack and the DIY mini-XLR connector set arrived.

The TRS jack immediately impressed me, being really fancy, made out of rather thick metal. But when I turned to admire the mini-XLR connector set, I noticed something was off: One of the connectors has three pins, the other four, making the set unusable.

What a shame. Well actually not. At closer inspection it turned out the cable hole in the male connector is too wide and the one in the female connector way too small for my cable. So it would not have worked nicely anyway. That however does not mean I totally scrapped the idea: If in the future I find a better fitting set, I can still splice it into the cable.

Anyway, on to the TRS jack. This time I choose a 10€ model and the difference in quality was apparent. Not only is the cable cramped down in this one (outright making the fault that killed the previous one impossible) but the screw-on cover actually fits well (the old ones cover constantly unscrewed itself until I applied some super-glue). There is less wiggle room inside this conector, making the soldering job pretty damn fiddly. But I got there in the end. And I am pretty happy with the results. I even managed to correctly guess the polarity the first time!

Now I was finally able to use my headphones again and everything was working fine...

...until I tried plugging it into my phone.

It just loosely sat in there, not snapping into place like it should do. Bloody hell.

Honestly I blame the phone here; The TRS jack is a rather high-range one, while the phone is a cheapo 60€ one I got as a quick replacement when my last one decided to die. And the jack fits everywhere else: Laptop, all those extension cables, my amplifier, my old dead phone, everywhere, no problems. And everything also fits into the phone, so I really have no idea what is going on here.

This is annoying. I honestly don't want to try yet another TRS jack. I think as a workaround I might get a very short TRS extension. Apparently they now also exist with lengths under ten centimeters.

Part 2

Yes, less than a month after the last repair, here we are again. And it is a cable fault again. Turns out those repairs truely were futile. The new cable I installed? It broke.

I suspect this will become a common theme. If I just installed a new cable I would not be surprised if I had to replace that one eventually as well. Because blaming the cable is not very sensible, it must be my usage pattern, right?

I really do not want to break out the soldering iron every time I need to replace the cable if they break on me that easiely. Expensive heaphones often have a 3.5mm TRS socket instead of a hard-wired cable (pun absolutely intended). It is not exactly hard to install such a socket and TRS-to-TRS cables are common and cheap.

So I ordered such a socket, new pads because the old ones were already falling apart and another phone, because guess what broke the same day. Yeah, it was one of those days.

When the socket arrived, I discovered a slight problem. Turns out the hole in the headphone casing - where the cable previously lived - was too large for it. I should really get into the habit of meassuring things. Making holes smaller generally does not have particularly sturdy results, so I needed a new solution (That I could simply make a new, smaller hole in the other headphone pod only occured to me afterwards).

I found two RCA sockets in my parts bin, leftovers from a failed project, which fit perfectly into the hole. Not exactly what I had planned, but it would still allow the cable to be easiely exchanged. I needed two because RCA only has two contact per connector. Both on the same pod would have looked goofy, so I made an additonal hole in the other pod and removed the cable linking the two. I had to remove a lot of material to get the sockets to sit flush, but it is not visible from the outside.

The soldering job is a bit shoddy, definitely not my proudest work, but it does what it is supposed to do. Unfortunately I only had this heavy-duty audio wire left, which is intended to connect speakers to an amplifier. That turned out to be somewhat of a problem, becase not only has it lots of thermal mass, making it pretty annoying to solder with the cheapo iron I have, it also violently resonates when I play a song with strong bass lines. I recently got into synth-wave, so this was pretty annoying. I fixed it by wrapping the cables with ... err, audio-transparent insulation, also known as tissue paper.

Let's hope I never have to open the headphones up again.

Finally I used some thin metal pieces to cover up the holes from the connector cable and the socket where once a microphone could be plugged in.

Overall I am really happy with this repair. It looks way better than I expected and TRS-to-RCA cables are also common and cheap. And it also fixes the major problem of the previous repair: I can now connect my headphones to my phone again.