Headphone wires aren’t what they use to be

All I have to do now is solder them onto a plug. Yeah, right.

My lovely (and so expensive I never told number one wife I bought them) Ultimate Ears headphones have broken. The wire that goes into the plug has failed on one of the connections. Being a chap who’s not afraid of hardware (perhaps because I don’t know that much about it) I was happy to get a new plug and solder it on. That is, until I saw what passes for wire these days.

In the Olden Days ™ headphones were wired with the next thing down from mains cable, which could be dismantled and worked on with industrial scale tools. My old Sony phones were much tougher too. They even survived a trip around the robot vacuum, which took a fancy to them one day.

Nowadays, with fancy “litz” cables and stuff it looks like it is pretty much impossible to mend the darned things. And they aren’t even heavy enough to serve as a decent paperweight.