Skull Candy Headphones

I picked up a pair of nice-but-broken Skullcandy headphones from a friend. Symptoms- right side doesn’t work. Wiggling the cables doesn’t help.

Obvious solution: Take the lid off! And so I did. The wires tested continuous from the ring, through the speaker, and to the end of the cable from the shell. There was a resistance (of about 30 ohms? If I recall correctly.) across the speaker, indicating that it was still functional, not just passing current. I resoldered the wires to the pads because it looked like the original joints were all cold soldered, which makes for a poor connection.That did not fix the fault, instead isolating he faultto three feet of cable.

Wires always break at the connectors. That’s where they bend. The easiest connector to get to is by the plug. Taking the plug apart revealed nothing useful. More continuity testing revealed that the break was in the actual wire. Cut the wire back and inch, and it works. Reassemble everything in reverse order, with heat shrink tubing, and tada, working headphones.

All pictures are preoperation.

Here we’ve got the pads where the wires connect to the speakers. The blue wire has the best connection of the four because the other three are cold solder joints or have resin caked around where the wire exits the solder, another sign of a bad joint.

This is the inside of the plug. It looks like they filled it with hot melt glue and jammed the stress relief on over it. Crude, and not much better than what I did. I cut the glue off to get to the plug so I could resolder the wires to it.

The wires. The set on the right are all broken. If you look carefully, they are all missing wires from their left half- headphone cables are usually composed of multistrand wires with insulation that burns off when soldered. The left set is perfectly fine. Here, the yellow ones are from the shell/power, red is from the ring, and blue is from the tip of the plug.

Attenuator

If I could make that is increasingly smaller text, I would.

Waaay back in the day (7th grade-ish), I got a Huke for Christmas. You’ve never heard of Huke before and that’s okay, because Huke is/was/produces royally craptastic mp3 players. This is the Huke after cannibalization, which is after I drilled holes in the back of the casing to put an actual battery on it…

The electronics in it were so bad that I could hear them at any volume. Also, the lowest volume setting was painfully loud to me… The obvious result is to start a project that will take me the next five years and three release versions to finish properly. Of course.

The first attenuator has an openable housing around the plug to permit modifications like this. I soldered two resistors in, one for the left ear and one for the right. I don’t remember what their resistance was, only that it cut the volume by 20 dB. I had the foolish expectation that the provided strain relief would actually work. It didn’t and I went through an amusing (in retrospect) series of poor fixative measures.

Not Quite a Cube

These things are cubes only they’re missing half their sides and there is thread strung between the remaining sides. Do I get points for their/they’re/there usage? Anyvay, my father built and strung the originals of these when he was a kid. All I’ve done is restring them. The small one and the black and white one are duplications of patterns he used.  The black and white one is an exact replication while the small one only uses the same pattern but different colors.

The blue one is mine (well, I stole the shell…). I made up the pattern. It’s not finished (but it’s more finished than in the full view of it) because I ran out of thread in that color.

The small one. It sometimes has an optical illusion where it seems to come out instead of in. It doesn’t do that in real life, I swear.

There is more awesome stuff after this break, I swear!