I was stuck on a 14 hour flight last week, and to my disappointment, only one of the two headphone speakers were working. The plane’s media centre has an audio connector that looks like this:
The hole to the left is smaller than a 3.5mm headphone jack, and designed for a proprietary headphone connector that I didn’t have, and the two holes to the right are part of a different proprietary connector which match with the cheap airline headphones to provide the left and right audio channels.
By reversing the connector, I was quickly able to determine that the headphones were not faulty, because this swapped the missing audio channel to the other ear. It’s also immediately obvious that since there are no left vs. right polarity markings on either the receptacle or the headphones, there’s a 50% chance that you’ll get reverse stereo.
With the fault identified, and lots of time to kill, I decided to try to hack a workaround. I borrowed some tweezers from a nearby passenger, and slowly ripped off some of the exterior plastic to expose the signal wires. To my surprise there were actually four wires, instead of three using a shared ground.
With a bit of care this only took about five minutes. The next step was to “patch” the working positive and ground wires from the working channel, into the speaker from the broken channel. I did this by trial and error using a bit of intuition to try to keep both speakers in phase.
A small scrap of paper acted as an insulator to prevent short circuits between the positive and negative wires. Lastly, a figure eight on a bight was tied to isolate the weak splice from any tension, thus preventing damage and disconnects.
The finished product worked beautifully, despite now only providing monaural audio and is about five centimetres shorter, which is still perfectly usable since the seats hardly recline. The flight staff weren’t angry that I had cannibalized their headphones, but also didn’t understand how my contraption was able to solve the problem.
This fun little ten minute hack helped provide some distraction in economy class, and maybe it will be useful to you since I doubt they’ve repaired the media system in the seat! If you work for Emirates, let me know and I’ll give you the seat and flight number.
Happy hacking!
James
I usually just partially pull my headphones out of the plug until both ears are connected to the same channel. It’s a bit finicky as sometimes I’ll lose an ear, but I find it less annoying than bringing a converter.
Unfortunately I tried this first, and couldn’t get it to work!
What did you do for the rest of 13 hours and 50 minutes ??
I watched a movie, took photos of the hack, and slept. I also ate some airplane food, but there was nothing notable about that except that it wasn’t very good. (Economy class)
Well if this plane catches on fire, we will know it was because of you…paper is not a good insulator for short circuits…they have special electric tape for that
The amount of current and voltage flowing through isn’t enough to remotely come close to causing a fire. A few people on Hacker News did the math: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12118993
This post is tagged ‘puppet’ and thus is showing up on Planet Puppet. As far as I can tell ;), this has nothing to do with Puppet.
Very true, sorry. It’s part of my the automatic tags I use, and this post was an exception. If it offends you, I can change it.
The technological genius of some people always amazes me lol
Though in this day and age it may be wise not to play to much with wiring and such on an airplane hah!
Ohh and congrats on your blog being listed as one of the most popular right now on wordpress!
Cool beans, where is this listed?
Sweet hack. I usually have an adapter with me now. The benefit of having good headphones on a flight is just so awesome. But in case I forget I will remember this hack.
The usb ports have only the power connections I believe. I tried everything I could with my phone and laptop.