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.