Why vintage headphones are better than today headphones

Headphones made today goes bad and doesn’t last as long. It is because of the crap quality wire they use. It’s very thin. Why the 3.5mm to RCA cord use better wires than it.

Here’s a list of symptoms of when headphone are going bad:

• One or two speakers only sound good when the cord is push in or pulled a certain way
• It sounds like its under water or sounds filtered.
• When the cable moves the sound disappears

I gotten a earbuds from eBay once and they didn’t last a month. So to figure out why they didn’t last long I cut and stripped the cord. Boy was I disappointed! There was only one strain of wire for both positive and negative wire.

Here’s what you can do to help prevent it

1. Buy new headphones. Make sure they are the 2-cord molded in one cord(like a 3.5mm to RCA cord)
2. Take apart the broken one and solder the a thicker wire.(That might be hard to do,but it is easier than the cheap stuff they use now a days)
3. Get Bluetooth headphones. This is probably the easiest, but more expensive plus the headphones take batteries.

The headphones I plan on getting are from Scott for 14 dollars. They look like this:

There is 2 pinholes for the cable. So you may be able to make your own cord or replace it if it goes bad. The headphone has a impedance of 128 ohms. He has other ones two with thick cables.

Here is the circuit for driving a crystal headphone it will use a current limit resistor. The good news is the headphones I’m using is 128 ohms impedance so its closer. The resistor depends on the impedance of headphones. It is probably best to get a high resistance trimpot so you can start at the highest resistance and go down until the volume is perfect. You will want to make sure you solder the 2 wires on each pot the same, doesn’t matter which as long as you solder the middle pin and one of the side pins and they are the same on both. To test it you will want measure the resistance on the left and right channels only(between not ground) and make sure that it is trimpot resistance times 2.

I will try it with part of paper clips soldered to a thick 3.5mm to RCA cord(cut and stripped of course) and see if that works. I might be able to tape the paper clips to the headphones to make sure that they stay in place. But the looks of the cord it may be good quality. But to make sure of remaking the cord is easy. I decided to use a 3.5mm to RCA cord. The total cost is $30.87 including the cost of shipping and from all electronics parts and Scott’s headphones but it should work, I will update this post when I actually test it. The parts will be ordered after December 8th.