Today I received in the post a cheap soldering kit to help me fix my headphones, I’ve got a premium pair of headphones, not reference but high end dj level, nice rounded sound, tight bass and they have not worked for over two years, I’ve not found anywhere to fix them.

With my recent cheap laptop fix only costing me £20 to get it back up and running it’s inspired me to take stock of the situation and just get in there and fix them myself — when you are trying to fix something you need the right tools for the job otherwise you will be struggling to get anywhere.

I’ve been getting by with in-ear headphones for the last few years and i either wanna fix these cup ones or throw them out as part of my minimise mission to cut down on the amount of stuff I’m carrying, storage of life assets is important to me in the transition to the next stage in the next few years, taking only what I need and not anything more.

I guess you could see the headphones as a bit of a luxury but if I’m honest there is nothing more liberating I can imagine that looking out of a wonderful scene from the back of a van while you have your favourite music playing in you headphones — might as well do that with good cans right?

helping hands fix everything

I tried to fix the headphones before, cut the bent plug moulded plug off and stripped down the wires, tried to solder them and hit problems with fibres in the wires but for a moment I did get audio so I know they still work, the major issue was how fiddly it was, impossible and frustrating you really need to have a set of helping hands for fairly precision work like this.

I learned to solder because of cb radio, my nickname back in the day was dangermouse (which later became dmouse and dm) I went through a bunch of iterations to keep hold of my nickname, through my depeche mode see thru vinyl importing days from America to present day after selling me.dm to Evan Williams, everything should have a legacy and story attached to it otherwise what are we doing here on planet earth!

i was seventeen when I had my first cb radio, I had a few, I blew up a few, bought aerials, installed one in a car, had a channel 41 above channel 40, the standard channels that me and my friend cabbage could talk privately on, kinda like a sideband, kinda encrypted in a way (of course ham operators could tune on to it!) but it opened my eyes to being on the outside looking in — I learned a lot about life from my cb radio and hacking in progress visits to the Netherlands, crazy how life has bought me to here.

frustration and fuss

when I first noticed that the headphones jack was busted I did what most people would do and try and contact some kind of online support — seeing as I’ve collected a lot of twitter social go go juice over the years I thought it might be a good idea to check out their twitter accounts.

Overall it amounted to nothing, they had no ‘support’ or ‘customer service’ that could fix a headphone plug which led me to think that we really do just product things without a care for the dust to dust ratio of these products, we just make and make and they take up landfill until someone finds a way to break them down into something else useful.

I loved the headphones that much that I decided to keep them knowing that at some point I’d fix them up, I can’t throw them away — it’s like when you find that perfect pair of shoes or trousers that you will fix and fix until they are just threads hanging together because you love the way they fit and feel, that’s how I feel about these headphones — at £200 on eBay still for the Audio Technica Professional Monitor ATH-PRO700 Sv Mk1 I’m gonna try and get the time out of em! :)

we live in a culture of throwing it away

It was obviously a design flaw on the mk1 because the Audio Technica ATH-PRO700 MK2 have a cable that you can disconnect thus allowing you to purchase (again, not fix, replace) the cable from headphone to computer, I’d love to upgrade to the new ones but these mk1’s worth perfectly fine with a new plug on — absolutely no need to just throw them, in fact why don’t we go the extra step and UPGRADE them! :)

I decided that if I was going to fix them that I should improve them at the same time, none of the other ‘gaming’ headphones have the audio quality that I’m used to (at least I assume that because I’m old and grumpy and loyal to audio technica) but the downside is that my current headphones don’t have that crucial microphone — not normally a problem because I have the apogee mic I use for recording courses and suchlike but if we are fixing we wanna upgrade too! :)

Antlion – Antlion Audio do a fantastic little bolt on microphone so that you can use it with your favourite headphones, you can get them on amazon here in the uk and they are not expensive at around £66 — it’s a quality microphone that you can attach to your loved cans — I picked up the add-on usb part too GDL-0426 - XM-26 which allows you to then feed in the microphone input and output the usual headphones out to your cans.

inspire others by showing and doing

It would have been quite easy for me to drop a bunch of money (that I don’t have) on a pair of headphones for ‘just gaming’ or ‘just music’ again but then I’m stuck with a situation of throwing away a perfectly good pair of headphones or having more than one set when really I love the sound and ‘head’ feel of these ones, they have travelled with me back and forth to america and across europe and even if they stopped working at least now I can just take the microphone off onto whatever I get next.

conclusion

Repairing things is like a lost art in some regards and that’s kinda sad, there is so much satisfaction to be had to repair or make something that was broken or did not exist before, I wish I had more skills and had peers that I could look up to that could teach me their muscle memory in a swap for technology skills that I have.

I hope one day that comes to the blockchain so I can phone and video chat with a plumber, engineer or gardener in real time and get tips and tricks and virtual hand holding where we both get something out of the exchange.

Thanks for coming on this journey with me! :)

pinterest epic wins pinboard → brand advocate for nokia, 1000heads, verisign → won vloggie for node666 (san fran 2006) → television for time team history hunters 1999 (burton on trent) → sold me.dm to evan williams in april 2011 → went to phil campbell, alabama to help raise money after tornado ripped up the town (was on sky news, bbc news)→ CNN for sxsw 2013 about austin south by southwest event → video chat with robert scoble from rackspace → music video can you spot me? → won the digital derry contest for 5k euros → crowdfunded digital signage concept called pi street → now living life through digital blockchains.