Help Fix Headphones - Wiring Issue?
 

My son broke the tip off the stereo headphone plug of some Shure headphones. So I went to Radio Shack, bought a stereo headphone plug, and figured on repairing the damage.

I gather that each earpiece shall have two wires, one ground and one for the signal, with ground going to the plug's outer ring, one channel going to the plug middle ring and the other channel to the plug's tip. Indeed, each earpiece has a rubber sheathed cord, which houses two very fine wires, that are a mix of metal strands and fine nylon-ish strands.

Here's is where I get confused. One wire is gold and one is another color (red for one channel, gray for the other). When I temporarily connected these to the different parts of the plug, with the plug inserted to a iPod, I heard nothing. I tried various permutations, silence each time.

Investigating some more, these seem like odd wires. If I touch my VOM's probes to the same wire just 1/8" apart, resistance reads infinite. If I keep trying, sometimes I can briefly get a reading, like 3000 M ohms. So for some reason, it is really hard to get an electrical connection with these wires, and I can't temporarily connect them to the jack and verify all is correct before soldering. In fact, I wonder if I can effectively solder this stuff.

Advice? Should I just assume the gold wires are ground and the red and gray wires are the signal, and solder them to the plug? Should I admit I'm a doofus and spend $70 for another set of headphones? Is it possible that this stuff can only be handled by 17 y/o Chinese factory workers with teeny fingers and keen eyesight?

Try touching the wires to an AA battery while listening to the speakers, this will tell you what wire is common to the two speakers and will also tell you if there is a break in the wires farther up the cable.

To clarify: use the gold wire on the - side of the battery and stroke the + side with the other wires individually.

Are we talking standard TRS stereo headphone jack? If so, the TRS stands for Tip - Ring - Sleeve. The most common config. is as follows:

Tip = L channel
Ring = R channel
Sleeve = Ground

If that's how you have it, and still no joy, then I'd be scratching my head too.

Could it be the iPod giving you grief (like a TRS vs. TRRS issue)? Try a different source to see if you get anything.

What you did would have been my guess too. Red=tip, gray=ring, both golds = sleeve.


If you solder it up and it doesn't work, cut off a half inch and start over, no big whoop.

So, is the Gold, Red, and Silver the colors of the insulation? Or the colors of the wires them selves. a lot of companies are making the wire, then PAINTING them instead of using an actual insulation on the wire. I've found that if I make all of my connections, and then "burn" the coating / paint off, then solder them I can get them to work. I've done this with a couple of sets of headphones.
Might be worth a try.

The wires themselves are colored. I'll try burning the colors off.