Sound Off

I have two pairs of wonderful Sony headphones. They sound great and have active noise cancelling. Perfect for flying (that engine noise just disappears) and great in the office. They even have a standard (as opposed to proprietary) detachable cord that thrills me since my last pair (not Sony) had cord issues.

Too bad both of mine are both broken in the same way. After about 18 months of use, the support for one of the earpieces cracked causing that earpiece to dangle making the headphones impossible to wear.

No, I haven’t contacted Sony about this. Both headphones are well out of warranty, discontinued, and I don’t reasonably expect Sony to do anything about it. They’re not expensive enough that I’m willing to fight customer service to get replacements. So I haven’t reached out.

Fortunately, one headphone is cracked on the left and the other on the right. This gave me the bright idea of disassembling them enough to swap out the broken parts of one with good parts from the other to make one good one again.

Silly me!

Although Sony uses standard non-Torx screws, they were torqued beyond my ability to unscrew them. I’ve got a set of cheap smaller screwdrivers that fit the teeny-tiny screws. I managed to get a few unscrewed, but most of the screws simply sat there, resiting any attempts to seat the screwdriver well and get the screw out.

After twenty frustrating minutes of effort, I still have two broken headphones, only one is now slightly disassembled. I might have to buy better screwdrivers. But at the moment, all hope of fixing them has faded.

In the meantime, I’m using a gaming headset at the office for music. It sounds OK, but doesn’t do noise cancelling, which is less than ideal. Since the Sonys are discontinued, I’m prowling eBay for replacements and have one bid in.

Wish me luck!

 

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