A combination of me running over my headphone cord and my cat being a shithead has resulted in my nicest headphones going kaput. But luckily the fault is right at the end of the cord, about 10" from the jack.
Has anyone tried to reconnect a headphone cable? It seems like it’d be a super easy repair, right? (insert anakin/padme meme)… right?
Additional topic for discussion: How do y’all avoid running over your headphone cable?
The best solution I’ve come up with so far is to hook the cable over one of the hooks on my cable pegboard.
i think its quite tricky bc the individual wires are coated in some kind of shielding. Whenever I have bought replacement headphones wires that need to be soldered to the drivers, I make sure they are pre-tinned at the tips of the wires
As for the last question: i always got spiral cables on all my headphones and on top of that i switched a while ago to AIAIAI for all my headphones ( DJ and music making and field recording) cause i was sick of broken parts which leads to must buy a new one (played a lot of gigs in all kinds of partys and therefor DJ headphones had hard times)
I’ve fixed a couple pairs of AKGs and Sonys over the years. It’s not hard at all, just involves heat shrink tubing and soldering a couple of conductors. You’ll want to do something to strengthen the cable—a tie-off is probably the easiest method.
Yeah I would never again buy hardwired because the cable is always the first to go. Although all of the plastic stuff and moving parts around the headband and earpieces are close behind. Sucks to have to dump perfectly good drivers because the build quality of everything else is so shoddy.
I was dumbfounded by the topic until I realized, that there are still headphones without detachable cables. Completely forgot about those, the last headphone without detachable cable I’ve owned must have been like 25+ years ago.
I haven’t had to fix any beyerdynamics yet (I also use 880s) but I’ve fixed a lot of headphones.
I’d say it’s really easy but with one tricky element, usually. Like what @mutant said, more often than not headphone wire is coated, not just sleeved. You strip the ends and it’s still not stripped. I’ve found that burning off the coating on the individual wires before attempting to tin them works for me but be careful because it’s very fine and very supple wire and you don’t want to damage it, it’s like tinsel. I use my junk iron to burn away the coating since I can bring the temp up gradually until it does its thing.
The alternative of course is to replace the cord entirely with either a new cord or a jack but that obviously involves opening the headphones. It’s the more proper route to take but I can’t say how complicated beyers are to open (or to close again).
Another alternative is to cut the existing cable at appropriate length and attach (fe)male cable jack connector to it and then use extension cord between headphones and source of necessary.
Get a quote on professional repair. Check the price of used headphones. Pursue the lesser of the 2 costs after factoring in the inconvenience of paying for your original headphones a second time i.e. if the cost of the repair is more than X% of the cost of the new headphones, consider the new headphones.
If you buy used headphones, swap your ear cups over and call it a day. If you have the originals repaired, I guarantee you will be more attentive towards them the second time around.
I hate spiral cables, they’re microphonic and feel weird. I hate short cables, I’m more likely to damage the headphone itself or the jack it’s plugged into. Or my neck.
I got a very long version of the factory cable for my AKG’s, the cable is made by AKG. It cost over $30 for the stupid cable so I find that I’m reminded to be careful by the fear of not wanting to pay another $30 (it might have been $39 and I just chose to remember the “3” rather than acknowledge that it was $40) to replace the cable, otherwise I would have probably already rolled my chair over it and cut it in half a hundred times over.
Anyways, sucks but I’d say replace the whole cable rather than try to repair the damaged part and if you can’t do it yourself, hand it off to someone who can or bite the bullet and replace them.
You’ll probably have a reflex instinct to be careful about doing it again for at least a year or 3 going forward.
I had the same issue with the DT770s in the past. I modded it by taking the cable out completely and adding a 3.5mm socket where the cable came out. It was a long time ago but iirc was a very straight~forward soldering job. Easier than repairing the cable as they have to take a lot of strain and that is hard to get right when repairing.
It was this one. Surprisingly still available 10 years later. You can see it’s a “panel mount” with a little thread and nut included. The nut stops it being pulled out of headphones.
