Ramblings

I use earphones a lot, although mostly indoors, I normally try to spare people around me from music or other noise. It's not uncommon that I stay up quite late so it's been ages since I first got hold of some earphones to listen to music late at night instead of keeping neighbours awake.

Anyway, I've been able to break quite a few over the years, everything from breaking handles, bars, arcs etc. to wearing off cables, or plugs.

This time I decided I didn't want to give up easily on a pair whom which the cable between the the left and right part was torn off. After some fiddling around with it, I manged to get some sound from both sides if the cable was held in a special way. (It had a small rift on it.) However it wasn't really logic which position it needed to be to have contact.

So, I put on some bright light and got an extra pair of glasses in front of me as I bluntly cut the cable and prepared to remove the insulation to twist the conductors together and put some insulation tape over it. That always work. I thought. It turns out, the cable had two apparent conductors, with two different colors, but since they were adjacent, they had to have the actual conductor inside them.

Of course, there wasn't anything inside, just the bunch of tiny colored cables and some white featherish thread in the middle. Check the picture. Anyway, after some thought and searching the net I realised each of the small individual colored cables were conductors. A suggestion was to scrape off the colored insulation, but that was easier said than done. Someone mentioned how the heat of the solder iron weared off the insulation and I tried out a lighter. I wired the conductors together, put on some music and melted the insulation from the "knots" till I got contact. Voila, working earphones (It's 3:37 AM here, so excuse me if this is obvious to you, I'm happy at least )