Koss PortaPros repair

Something like six years ago I bought a pair of Koss PortaPro headphones. Yeah, yeah, they're overhyped meme headphones in some online circles. I make no miraculous claims regarding them, they simply sound clearly above average for the price to me (I forget exactly what I paid for them, at a physical Clas Ohlson store in Sweden, but I remember thinking it was surprisingly cheap). The build quality is not exceptional, but perfectly reasonable for the price. The foam earpads got stretched out and saggy over the years. Because they are overhyped meme headphones, it was easy to buy after-market replacement pads online, even larger/plusher "upgrade" pads, which I appreciate. But recently the cable on my pair wore out near the jack. For a few months it was still usable - very occasionally the audio would cut out or get scratchy, but if I wiggled the cable a little it would quickly be fine again. The situation slowly but surely got worse, of course, and eventually they became basically unusable.

I bought a replacement jack to rectify the situation, since the headphones were otherwise perfectly serviceable and soldering a jack to some wires is not especially hard. I "splurged" on a high-quality gold-plated jack from Neutrik, for all of something like 5 EUR. The installation was, in fact, a lot more difficult than I was used to. The wiring on the PortaPros is not your typical copper wire with a thin plastic sheath which you can cut and strip easy peasy. It's something more like what is often called "magnet wire", in that there's just a very thin transparent enamel or whatever coating over the conductor, but unlike typical magnet wire is not a single solid conductor (which would obviously be entirely unsuitable for headphones) but some very finely stranded stuff. The two wires for each channel are also entwined around some kind of tough nylon or whatever cord, presumably to absorb shock if they get snagged on a doorknob or whatever. The overall impression is of much higher build than "just plain wire", but man, it's a huge pain in the ass to solder by hand. That nylon shock cord likes to burn and get crud everywhere. The enamel coating needs to be carefully scraped off with a sharp knife edge. When I finally got a passably neat connection soldered up for both 'phones I realised that, of course, like I an idiot, I had neglected to first slide on the wire-side part of the jack housing, so I had to lop it off and start again, further shortening the already on-the-short-side cable. I tried again the evening after got it done properly. The new jack works great and will hopefully do so for at least another six years.

Even though this wasn't quite as quick and easy as I initially expected, it was still very doable, and it's so nice to have the option to do basic repairs like this yourself at home on things you use every day. The increased ease of debugging and repairing wired stuff compared to wireless stuff more than makes up for the slightly reduced convenience, in my opinion. Even if it hadn't worked out, for the low cost of a replacement jack it was well worth rolling the dice before immediately buying a whole new replacement set.