Short in headphone wire

[eyejob]

I have a headset that only gets audio in the left ear. I suppose there is a short in the wire, is there any way to repair this?

 

[Harvey]

First, it's not necessarily a short. It could be open (broken), indstead of the two leads being shorted together.

Yes, you can fix it, but you'll need to know where the short or break is, and it will help if you know which end of a soldering iron to grab.

Most headphone leads contain two wires (one for each earpiece) inside a metal or metalized plastic shield that also serves as the common ground connection for both channels. The two wires are usually red and white or red and black, but they may be other colors. Some better units have four separate wires with the ground leads connected to the shield at only one end.

If it's at or close to the connector end, you can chop off the connector and whatever length of wire is necessary to get to the part of the lead that's still good, and get an new connector like this metal one or this plastic one.

If the bad part of the cable is too close to the earpieces, you'll have to hope you can get inside them and rewire them. You may be able to fild a pre-assembled cable like this that has the plug already connected so all you'd have to do is replace the defective cable. You may be able to find a longer one if you need it.

If the fault is close to the earpieces, you can also chop it at the bad point and splice the wires with your new section. It won't look as nice, but if you do a good job, it will work. It would be best to use some heat shrinkable tubing to cover the splices.

I hope that helps.