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headphone wiring question

post #1 of 23
10/25/06 at 5:05pm
Thread Starter 
I have to solder a new jack onto my daughter's fancy iPod headphones.

Is there a universal wiring protocol for left, right & common wires, or do I have to wing it?
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post #2 of 23
10/25/06 at 5:35pm
On the wires it is usually red=right, black=left, braided shield=common. The plugs are usually tip(self explanitory)=left, ring(between tip and sleeve)=right, sleeve(part furthest from tip)=common. I hope this helps.
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post #3 of 23
10/25/06 at 6:22pm
Right on the ball JK!!
Are you into electronics or audio tech??
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post #4 of 23
10/25/06 at 7:59pm
Now go real audiophile and use silver solder.

On second thought, don't worry.

It's only an Ipod.
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post #5 of 23
10/25/06 at 8:35pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by canyondiver
Right on the ball JK!!
Are you into electronics or audio tech??

11 years in electronics manufacturing.
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post #6 of 23
10/26/06 at 4:12am
Quote:
Originally Posted by jklett
11 years in electronics manufacturing.

Ahh, Gotcha. What did you make?
I was a lowly tech and engineer in the pro audio and recording industry for 21 years. I talked to folks like you all the time...
Which comparator runs the input record amp??
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post #7 of 23
10/26/06 at 5:39pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by canyondiver
Ahh, Gotcha. What did you make?
I was a lowly tech and engineer in the pro audio and recording industry for 21 years. I talked to folks like you all the time...
Which comparator runs the input record amp??

I still work there and we mainly do industrial stuff. Lots of cable harnesses and the like, but we also do PC board assembly and testing. We do work for AT&T, Con Ed, and Merck(among others). I know how to work on some consumer electronics because I'm poor and have to fix my stuff when it breaks and I can use the equipment at work to do it with. A lot of that stuff is really pretty simply designed and can be troubleshot without schematics. If I can't figure it out, I ask my boss who has the equivelant of a masters in electronic engineering(he went to school in Scotland).

Dogboy, sorry to hijack your post. Did you get your daughter's headphones fixed? If you are having trouble and the wires look nothing like what I described, post a picture of what you have and I'll try and talk you through it.
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post #8 of 23
11/12/06 at 11:42pm
I can't believe I ran across this! Just so happens I'm trying to fix my son's ipod headphones. I'm pretty sure it was a bad connection at the jack (or I hope so, because I already cut the wire), because when we wiggled the wire at the base of the jack, the right ear bud would go off and on as you wiggled it. I was going to splice a jack I cut of an old pair of ear buds just to see if I could jimmy rig it temporarily for my son, but I can't figure out which wires to connect between the ipod ear buds and the old salvaged jack. I attached a couple of pics if anyone can help. The one with the white exterior sheath is the ipod. The black exterior sheath goes to the plug I cannibalized from another ear bud set.
525
525
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post #9 of 23
11/13/06 at 7:52pm
Without ringing them out with an ohmmeter, I'd say that the cheap ones are wired like this=


The Ipod ones SHOULD be wired like this=


The easiest way to check the wiring on the piece with the ear buds is to take what you believe to be the + and - wires and touch them to a small battery(aa or aaa should work fine). You will hear a small click from the speaker that they correspond to. You can experiment a bit if it doesn't seem right, the battery method won't hurt anything. If by chance the wires(+ and -) get reversed, all it will do is shift the phase 180 degrees out. This shouldn't have much(if any) effect on sound quality though, it matters more when both speakers are sharing the same airspace(as in home stereos and the like).

A final note: make sure you tin the wires on the Ipod ones before you try and solder them to the other wires, they look like they have a lacquer coating on them and they won't want to solder if you don't burn it off first. All you do to tin them is to put the soldering iron on the wire and feed some solder(make sure to use a rosin core solder, not organic or water soluble flux or it'll corrode the wires in no time flat) onto the wires until the coating burns off and that section looks all silvery and shiny.

I hope this helps.
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post #10 of 23
11/13/06 at 8:58pm
Thanks for the reply jklett, but I can't view the pics you attached. I'll try the batter check like you suggest. I'm also wondering, how do the wires in the ipod not interfere with each other? They look like they all touch because they're all bunched in the white sheath.
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post #11 of 23
11/14/06 at 12:50am
Since we are on head phones here is a different twist. I'm completely deaf in my left ear so stereo phones are useless. Can I canvert a stero set to mono and maintain the sound quality.
Thanks for any info,
Cabo
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post #12 of 23
11/14/06 at 10:33pm
I gotta figure out this picture thing. Hows this? You should be able to correlate them with the text I posted above.
525
525
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post #13 of 23
11/14/06 at 10:40pm
Cabo, they sell stereo to mono adapters at radio shack for $3. I think #274-368 should do the trick. Basically you want to join the positives from both the left and right together. The negatives are already joined at the connector.
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post #14 of 23
11/15/06 at 12:42am
Thread Starter 
there will be a spot in my heart for whoever incorporates a strand of kevlar into the speaker wire so the wires stop breaking on my daughter's 40 dollar ipod headphones!

she buys them herself nowadays, but it galls me they are so costly and don't hold up
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post #15 of 23
12/7/06 at 2:04pm
i need to re wire my headphones for my sony ericsson p910 as the outter sleve is brakeing off exposeing the wires.

im thinking of getting some good headphones and wiring them in after the mic. my question is how do you solder these on they have no insulation just bare wires coloerd green and blue. im guessing the color is the insulator. so my question is how do you solder these wires?
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