I have a pair of Bose Soundsport wired earbuds that I really like – they are the only wired headphones that stay in my ears. So, of course, the wire has gone bad.
They have a mic and an inline remote. I cut off the jack and there are more wires than I expect – probably a set of wires directly from the earpieces and another set coming from the remote. Here’s what it has:
Two red wires
Two blue wires
One white wire (maybe this is the mic?)
Green wire threads wrapped around the white wire (I think this is the mic ground?)
Two copper wires
On the new jack that I bought, I have:
Red
White
Black
Green
I assume I can tie the two red wires together and connect them to the red wire from the jack. After that, I’m not sure – tie together the copper thread and green thread and connect to…? Blue goes to ? White goes to ?
Sorry to reply to my own OP, but there’s one other interesting complication – what I thought was a red wire is actually another multi-stranded copper wire – I assume the red is some sort of insulation, but how do I strip that? One website says to burn it off with a match.
It looks like there is a standard for which wire color is what in a headphone jack, but a quick search shows that at least some replacement jacks don’t follow the standard.
The 4 wires are Left, Right, Microphone, Ground. Probably White and Red are Left/Right, Black is ground, and green is mic, but you may want to test it.
You should be able to get a good enough electrical connection by just twisting the wires together with maybe some electrical tape to keep them from contacting the other wires so you can test out whatever wiring connections you are trying.
In case anyone is wondering, I figured out the wiring – red wire on the jack connects to the blue wire on the headphones, white on the jack to the red on the headphones, green on the jack to copper and green, black on the jack to white on headphones.
With that config, left and right seem right, volume up, down, and the skip button works, and the mic works.
I tried doing it all with tape, but it looks like I’ll have to bust out the soldering iron, because I couldn’t get things to stay connected. I also had to burn the ends of the wires on the headphone side to make a connection. I guess the soldering iron might have been able to burn some of that off, too.
Yeah, the problem is that one solders directly to a jack, but I have a jack with wires coming out of it. I’m not good enough at soldering to get everything connected directly to the jack.
In fact, I can’t even get the wires soldered together – maybe the tip on my gun is bad? How can I tell?
Sounds like your soldering iron maybe suffering from the same thing as your headphones !
Check the diameter of the Home Depot heat shrink, i just checked my local hardware store and their stuff is likely for home electrics (rather than tiny electronics)- the smallest says it’s for 1.8mm2 cable.
(The stuff I’ve got was a “selection box” from Aldi !!)
It worked! I might have used a heat shrink tube that was a little too big – it’s open on the ends. I’ll try and shrink it some more when I can get someone to hold the wire for me.
For a former electrical engineer, I’m shockingly bad at soldering.
I had a relatively cheap but nice sounding pair of JBL headphones until my cat chewed through the cord. When I peeled back the insulation I found the wires were some kind of thin strips of copper plated plastic that were a real challenge to solder because the plastic kept melting. I kinda-sorta repaired the break but eventually ended up buying a better pair from a different manufacturer. The new ones use a cord with a plug at each end and have jacks in each earpiece, as well as a spare cord.
