[sdiy] Repairing headphones

[Jason Tribbeck]

Hi,

> Is there a trick to soldering those micro leads in a set of 
> headphones? My present set is developing a short in the 
> molded jack. I tried to replace the jack on a set a while 
> back and found it impossible to solder the leads - they 
> seemed to be coated with something.

I had a pair of Sennheiser headphones whose cable was becoming decidedly
dodgy (I've got a habit of chewing on them [bad habit, I know] - my latest
ones are cordless headphones), so I replaced the cable and the connector
with Phono connectors (which is cheaper to get the cables for).

It, too, had a special coating on the cable, which I scraped a lot away with
a blade, and used plenty of heat/flux to remove. This allowed me to solder
it on to the phono connectors.

Unfortunately, with the cable in place, it looks a bit ... Frankenstein?
Matrix? - two cables seemingly emerging from the side of my head...

> It seems a shame to junk a decent set of headphones because 
> of something that >should< be so easily repairable.

Exactly what I thought!
--
Jason Tribbeck      Director of Research and Technology        Argogroup