Soldering broken headphones: Instructions
If your headphones are broken, you don't have to throw them away immediately - broken spots can often be soldered. We explain how this works for cables and plugs and what other approaches are available to repair headphones without soldering.
How to solder broken headphones
You can easily repair broken headphone cables and plugs by re-soldering the working cable parts or attaching a new jack plug to the cable. If you often carry your cable in your pocket, you should follow our instructions in the picture gallery. This variant does not look particularly pretty, but it reliably protects against cable breaks.
- To repair your headphones you need a soldering iron. You should also have a few shrink tubes ready.
- If your headphones only have a loose connection, feel the cables while listening to music. Noise is generated where the break is when you press. If you cannot find any damage to the cable, continue with step 9.
- Cut a few centimeters from the cable around the break point with a knife or side cutter and expose about one centimeter of the wires on both ends.
- Separate the three wires and burn off the colored paint with a soldering iron.
- If you cannot or do not want to solder, follow this practical tip: twist the three ends with their counterparts and isolate the cables from each other.
- However, the connection becomes more stable if you solder the wires. To do this, uncover the cable a few centimeters. Pull a shrink tube of several centimeters over the cable and a short, thin tube each over two of the three inner lines.
- First apply some solder to the tips of all leads. Now solder a wire together, pull the shrink tube over the area from which you burned off the paint and carefully shrink it using the soldering iron.
- Do this with all cables and finally shrink the large shrink tube over the entire exposed cable area.
- The cable break is often directly behind the jack. If you have diagnosed the fracture here or if you do not find the fracture, you have a good chance of repairing the headphones by installing a new jack plug.
- To do this, solder the blue wire to the tip (tip), the red wire to the ring (R) and the colorless mass to the shaft (sleeve).
- If your headphone jack has a loose connection, this practical tip can help.
In further practical tips, we will show you how to solder cinch plugs, repair jack cables, build a DVBC cable yourself, or replace power plugs.
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In addition to your defective headphones, you need a soldering iron and tin, a knife or side cutter, a jack plug, a few heat shrink tubes and a good 15 centimeters of cable with a cable cross section of 2.5 or 3.5 mm².
Cut the headphone cable and first separate the three lines and the non-conductive material.
Cut three five centimeter long pieces from the thicker cable and apply some solder to the 6 tips.
Now solder the three cables to the jack plug.
Burn the paint off the headphone cables as described above and apply some solder here as well.
Pull a large shrink tube over the three cables and a smaller tube over two of the three cables. Now solder the headphone cables together with the corresponding cables.
The result should look something like this. No cable is exposed, the shrink sleeves hold the cable in place. The result is not very good, but it is stable.
The great advantage of this construction is that the thick, tear-resistant cables protrude from your pocket. The new weak point is the transition from these strands to the headphone cable. However, the cable is hardly bent at this point. Test the result by connecting the repaired headphones to an MP3 player.
