1202 ALARM

These nice Sony headphones came in another batch of stuff from a kind Freegle user. One of the drivers (speakers) seemed to have burned out and the earmuffs were badly worn. I had a poke in the spares box labelled 'Speakers & Sounders (Small)' and found a pair of Sennheiser drivers that were the same size. The Sony ones were built into the headphone housing, but were easy to dismantle and the Sennheiser units fitted right in. It was just a matter of soldering the cables in and they were not only repaired, but upgraded. I measured the earmuffs to be 70mm and ordered replacements for $3 on AliExpress. The headphones are light and comfortable, but have the great Sennheiser sound quality. Job done.

Recently I was given another box of damaged electronics items including 2 gaming headsets. One was pretty badly smashed up, but yielded a cable with a 4-pole 3.5mm jack plug which turned out to be very useful. The other set was a Turtle Beach 'Ear Force' for the Xbox 360 with an inline amplifier and some unusual connections for the Xbox, but not much use with a PlayStation, mobile phone or PC.  I dismantled the little inline amplifier box, stripped out all the gubbins and just soldered the 4 connections from the recovered wire from the other headset to the Ear Force. It took 2 attempts to get the microphone connection the right way round, but it is working a treat now and is a very comfortable headset. The other advantage to this hack is an extra long cable. Nice repair. 

My son's Trust gaming headset developed an intermittent fault with the left earphone. Quick investigation revealed one of the connections had come loose. It didn't appear to have been very well soldered originally. A quick 5-minute repair and they are working good as new.  This type of wire is what my father called Litz wire, but reading up on it that might have been incorrect on his part. My grandfather was a pioneering amateur radio operator and almost certainly used proper Litz wire for radio frequency working on shortwave. Anyway, it is a strong and flexible wire suited to applications such as headphones and microphones, but needs the lacquer removed and to be tinned before soldering otherwise you get a poor joint.