Hasta La Gadget!

Question: Is it possible to graft the cables and electronics of a set of iPod inline-remote earbuds onto a pair of regular headphones, and still retain full functionality? Answer: Kinda.

Yesterday, I broke yet another set of headphones, this time yet another pair of my long-time favorite, the Koss Porta-Pro. These foldable headphones are lightweight, they sound great and they’re don’t cost much more than a pair of earbuds. They are also very delicate and I break them all the time. This time the cable wrapped itself around something and yanked. Result: dead cans.

Instead of tossing them, I thought I’d try to marry them up with the cable and remote from a pair of cheap but terrible earbuds. The goal was to make a pair of frankenphones with the great sound of the Koss’s, and the convenience of the remote. I had partial success, and made an interesting discovery along the way.

The first step was to chop off the useless parts of both. I popped open the Porta-Pros with a tiny screwdriver. There is an access panel glued over the solder joints and it is easy to pry open. Then I snipped and stripped the wires on the fully functional donor-phones (I have a broken set of Apple earbuds, but I wanted to make sure that I was working with fresh cables to eliminate one source of doubt).

Here came the first problem. Many headphone cables come stranded with filaments of nylon or some other thin cord. These are mixed in with the copper strands to add strength and stop stretching, but they also make these wires almost impossible to solder. The other hitch is that the two wires are pretty much intermingled in there, rather than in their own separate sheaths.

Before soldering (or rather, before searching the apartment for a soldering iron) I twisted the strands to make a test connection. To finish, you should take the cables right into the terminals on the earpieces, but this turned out to be unnecessary.

Why? Because no sound came through. Twisting the strands doubtless shorted something, but I have tried in vain to solder these kinds of cable before and it was beyond me. The soldering iron can stay under the sink or wherever it is for now.

But what was surprising was that the inline remote actually works. In fact, you don’t even need the earpieces connected. Plug in the jack and, like a decapitated chicken, things keep working even without a head. Play/pause and skip both worked great.

Which leads us to the real discovery of this otherwise failed experiment. Instead of buying a purpose made remote adapter, you could instead just use a splitter to plug both your headphones and a broken donor cable into the iPod. Listen through one, and control through the other. You can even run the remote section to an inside pocket or down your sleeve, something impossible when the remote is inline. And perhaps this would work with Bluetooth connected headphones, too. Conclusion: Partial success.

Photos: Charlie Sorrel