Why is it that you cannot fix the cable of your headphones just by taping together the two cut parts again, as you would do with a normal electricity cable?
Well, assuming that you make certain that the metal wires inside the insulated housing are actually touching each other, there’s no reason why you can’t. Just strip a small bit of insulation off each end, twist the appropriate ends together, and tape them over.
The tape, btw, is really more to provide insulation over the splice than it is to hold the two wires together. You can test that your connection is good (i.e., listen) before taping it up.
germanpp, you can’t fix a normal electricity cable by just taping it together. If you do this, you’re just asking to start an electrical fire.
Bear in mind that the wires going to each headphone earpiece is actually made up of two seperate wires. Both earpieces share a common ground wire but have different “hot” wires. To get correct stereo reproduction, be sure to splice the wires together in the same polarity–by that I mean positive to positive and negative to negative. If one of the earpiece wire sets is mismatched you will only get mono reproduction. Also, if you wire both earpieces positive-to-negative you will still get stereo reproduction, but the audio channels will be reversed (sounds normally heard on the right channel will play on the left and vice versa). Solder your splices if possible and wrap each wire securely with electrical tape to prevent the wires from shorting out. Use shrink tubing as an alternative if you want to get fancy, but run one end of the wire through the tubing before soldering.
As far as Zenbeam’s tip regarding electrical cables, you could resplice the cable together, but it wouldn’t be the safest thing to do. This is especially true when it comes to electrical cables that have polarized plugs. Better to buy a brand new cord and replace the cut cord entirely.
Hope this helps!
In the first sentence above, I should have used the word “are” in place of “is”.
M ycats, for some reason, love to bite headphone cables right in half. I have actually caught them in the act. They dont play with it or anything, they just walk over to it, bite it in two, and walk away like nothing happened.
I have lost lots of headphones that way.
But I have done the apparently impossible. I taped them back together.It didnt work well or last very long, but it worked.
The headphones I am talking about had two thin wires (it might have been four, in two sets of two) encased in plastic. I just stripped the wire, twisted them together, and taped. The quality was terrible and the tape came off quickly, but it worked.
I closed the other copy of this thread, at the link provided by LIONsob. Please continue the discussion here.
Guy Incognito wrote:
It’s not true that you’ll get mono if you wire one headphone with opposite polarity. In fact, you won’t even be able to tell the difference, because the speakers are isolated. With speakers together in a room, wiring one out-of-phase will kill your bass response below some frequency which is inversely proportional to the distance between the speakers. It’s an interesting experiment to do this intentionally, and compare the sound as you place the speakers closer together and farther apart. But get them on opposite sides of a room, and you’ll be hard-pressed to tell a difference. With headphones, never.
It’s also not true that if you wire them both with reversed phase, the channels will be reversed left-to-right. Again, you won’t be able to tell the difference. Try it!