Silician Sketchbook

When one of the channels on a headset drops out, and you have to fiddle with the wires to find the sweet spot such that it’ll come back, you know that the headset is on its last legs. But I’m not about to go and buy a new headset just yet. The one I was using was not really mine at first, and I wound up claiming it because no one else was using it.

I’ve since gone back to my original headset, but there was a reason why I stopped using it in the first place, which I’ve just rediscovered.

For one, the foam piece that covered the microphone spontaneously came off, but that’s not a big deal. More troublesome was that one day, the headset decided to switch to mono, and at the time I couldn’t figure out why.

A cool side-effect of having the headphones magically go mono is that the vocal channel of a song is either heavily attenuated or outright eliminated. And it turns out that if I twist the headphone connector around enough, I can likewise ditch the karaoke channel and get the vocals.

The novelty doesn’t last very long, but fortunately I can get stereo back by pulling the connector out slightly. One side is slightly attenuated as a result, but it’s better than being completely blindsided in a game.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 28th, 2008 at 2:47 pm and is filed under hardware, misadventures.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.