For the past few years, I’ve been using Senheiser HD 202s as my headphones (I found them lying unused in a cupboard – yay free stuff). So far they’ve been pretty good in my opinion, having never devled into the rabbithole that is audio at any point. Unfortunately, a couple weeks ago, one of the conductors in their cable seems to have come loose, and now the headphones only work when the cable is bent at a particular angle.

Having no idea where to begin trying to recrimp a 3.5mm jack, I put off fixing for a bit until I had an alternative idea – do away with the wired cable altogether and stick a 3.5mm jack socket on the actual headphone shell. That way if/when the cable goes again, it’ll be a lot easier to replace. Even better, I already had some jack sockets lying around from a previous (unfinished) audio project.

I started by opening up the earcups on both side. The mesh unclips and exposes four screws that hold the earcups together – much easier than I expected, but I guess repairability is what you get from 15 year old products. Then I desoldered the cable running into each of the speakers, pulled it out, and had a closer look at what space there was to work with. The earcups already has cutouts at the bottom for the cable to come out of, and by sheer luck, they seemed to already be the correct size to fit the 3.5mm jack socket. Unfortunately, the inside of the earcup was a different story. There were some ridges molded into the plastic that interfered with the jack socket, and meant it poked above the level of the mesh – suboptimal. However, after some… ‘modifications’, I was able to get the jack socket in without preventing the rest of the headphones going back together.

With the socket in place, I drilled a hole in the opposite end of the earcup to run a wire to the other earcup, using some of the original cable to connect them together.

Since I switched to these headphones, I have been missing having media controls on them, and so it would be nice to add some in future – unfortunately I don’t (yet) have any TRRS jack sockets nor any TRRS 3.5mm cables. At some point it would also be nice to make a new headband with a proper channel for the cable rather than it dangling loose.