It was about 10pm last night and I figured I’d just do half an hour’s practice on the guitar as I often do. I often use headphones to avoid causing undue annoyance to the neighbourhood, and like a lot of music equipment my Pod has a 1/4″ headphone socket, despite the fact that most regular headphones use a 1/8″ mini-jack, so I use a converter that came with the headphones (Sony in this case), pictured below.
Looks innocent enough, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not – when I came to remove the jack from my Pod (because I was routing via my amp today), I was dismayed to discover that only 2/3rds of the adapter actually came out; the section from the first divider upwards stayed firmly in the socket. On examining the adapter, I saw that the tip was only held on my 4 fairly small metal clips, which obviously after repeated use had failed. These were not particularly cheap headphones, they’re quite decent, but clearly Sony had cut costs on the 1/4″ adapter thinking that not many people use it. Bastards.
Fortunately I did manage to remove the offending part but it took almost an hour of swearing and building specialised tools from bits of wire, screwdrivers and tweezers. These sockets are quite deep and thin, and it wasn’t helped by the spring-loaded clip that is designed to stop the plugs coming out easily. I thought I was going to have to send it in for repair, because I would just void the warranty by taking it apart myself and the logistics of the socket were daunting, but luckily bending some wire into a very long & thin hook, several retries (there are several pieces to the end section and they all came out separately) and a lot of irritation eventually bore fruit.
So that was almost an expensive piece of kit wrecked by a £1 converter. I think I’ll buy a decent one next time instead of using what comes with the headphones.
October 6th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
Sony seems to be full of fail lately.
October 7th, 2009 at 11:46 am
I’m normally very happy with Sony stuff, it’s high quality as a rule. It just shows though that going cheap on something small like this can cause so much hassle.
I’ve ordered some much more robust converters from Planet Waves for next time.
October 8th, 2009 at 2:11 am
I have a better similar story. For some reason in my old Ford Laser, the engine head was made of a softer metal than the spark plugs one screws into it. After I bought the car and the spark plugs started randomly exploding out of the engine (most commonly on a freeway at 110km/h), because some idiot mechanic had cross-threaded them, I had to get a new reconditioned engine for AU$2000. All because of a $10 spark plug.
October 8th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
Ouch.
October 14th, 2009 at 12:41 am
Neuro, there is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicoil
It can be used to fix the threads. There was very likely no need to replace the whole engine. It is done a lot at automobile engine repair shops. I’ve done it myself, in fact.
It can definitely be used exactly for the spark plug threads! That’s what we were doing at a school I learned about this originally. A teacher even replaced spark plug threads “just in case” for his own engine with a light-metal alloy cylinder head so it will be stronger and what you described will likely never happen with that.
Even if helicoil would not have been used to fix it, I don’t understand why not just buy another cylinder head instead of a whole engine. If a spark plug comes *out*, that’s not very damaging to the rest of the engine.
November 13th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
Poundshop stuff, eh? Never trust it…