Episode: 2847
Title: HPR2847: earbuds
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2847/hpr2847.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 11:58:48

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This is HPR episode 2,847 entitled Earbudden.
It is hosted by Operator and is about 15 minutes long, and Karima Cleanflag.
The summary is my trials with Earbudden and custom setups.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an Honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
That's HPR15.
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Hello and welcome to another episode of HPR15.com, with your host Operator.
Today's episode is going to be pretty brief.
I'm going to talk about Earplugs or Ear Headphones, Ear Buds for portable applications.
Mostly phone.
It started back in the day with having a nice pair of headphones, and then needing cordability with that.
There's the option of just playing through your phone or device.
Then there's the option of wearing big old giant headphones.
You get better sound quality for cheaper.
Then there's the Ear Buds which are very portable, but usually you take a hit in sound quality and cost.
For relatively cheap, some of these gaming headsets have really good recording and really good microphones and really good audio, really good bass.
I'm a good bass person.
I like a lot of bass and my stuff.
Generally speaking, I'm not really an audio file, but I listen to a fair amount of music.
And needing to adjust the EQ of an Android device or whatever my player is, is not always an option.
Sometimes there's not a sound setting and you have to root the device and get access to be able to use some equalizer settings.
But most of your newer builds and newer phones have some kind of EQ inside of the settings.
Marshmallow and probably up or even before that, probably in Oreo.
You know, Marshmallow Oreo probably have some kind of audio setting in them for Android at least.
But I started getting into sound quality and different types.
So generally speaking, you've got your cheap run of the middle headphones to come with your phone.
Generally those are crap.
Actually, Apple have some pretty good reviews on there.
I think they're single driver headphones or they might be dual driver headphones.
So when I say drivers, I mean there's two different speakers in there.
So generally speaking, you'll have a single driver headset or your bud.
Then from there you get into like dual drivers where usually you have a bass driver and then you have a driver for the mids and the highs to make things simple.
And then if you're like super high-end, you're going to have what they call monitors for the lack of a better term.
And that's what you see when you see somebody doing a live performance.
They have that, you know, that clear plastic earpiece and then wraps around.
And then that goes in there here.
And that thing, those things are, you know, thousands of dollars for like real monitors.
You got folks like sure who makes some pretty good stuff out of the box for retail in.
But you can pay $200 for a decent set of sore headphones.
And that's just the bass, you know, the bass.
Well, excuse me.
So it started off just looking for some good dual driver headphones.
I ended up with the Sony something X, dual driver headphones kind of entry level, dual driver headphones for $200.
What I found is that you need something to push those extra drivers.
So for example, if you have a basic, you know, basic portable device and you plug in a, you know,
there are three driver headsets or three driver earbuds into them.
There's not going to be enough power to power all those drivers.
So when you plug into a weekly and a device that doesn't have a whole lot of power to push and even in the mid range.
When you, you know, push it to extreme, it's going to sound garbage anyway on most devices.
But in the mid range or at medium volume, you should get a fair amount of sound or enough sound out of the device where you don't have to turn it up all the way to its max.
Generally speaking, you don't want to have anything turned up all the way.
Because things start to clip out.
Generally speaking, you don't want to turn anything to its max.
Unless you're pretty sure that the sound quality is not going to suffer when it goes to the next hop down the chain of devices that it has to go through,
the drivers or software or whatever digital devices and all the devices.
So try to keep that in the mid range or to hide a mid range, but not next out.
That will help with some clipping along the way or if you have audio in your car and you turn it up.
You might have seen this if you had like Bluetooth in your car and you turn it up all the way in your headphones or your device.
It sounds like garbage in your car.
So you have to turn it down on your device and then you can turn up the volume in your car and kind of make up the difference.
What I will say is that Bluetooth audio is garbage.
Not a lot of people realize that, but the audio quality of Bluetooth was never really considered to be music for whatever reason.
More on the creative Bluetooth back in the day, they said, oh, we can't possibly handle that amount of bandwidth.
So we're not even going to count for anybody, but you know, anything but voices going across this wireless protocol.
Like why you wouldn't, you know, I guess it's just in its infancy and we didn't have the technology to push more bandwidth across the protocol.
But really, why would you come out with a protocol that can't push that?
And, you know, there's things out there that do intelligent things.
But at the end of the day, Bluetooth isn't enough.
It doesn't have the bandwidth to push full blown, you know, flat style, lossless audio across the air.
So that's something I kind of miss, misnomer, misinformation that people will get.
So I like wired devices. When I get a new phone, I make sure that it has a regular ear plug port.
If you do a regular port.
But really, the biggest thing is what deciding what drive you're going to get.
So I had a two driver. I realized that that wasn't enough power to push my week.
I had an older phone and it didn't have enough power to push.
Now this newer one has enough power to push and it's, you know, a reasonable,
reasonably loud thing.
So what I'll talk about now is that the options for getting the biggest bang out of your buck.
So you can buy the $200 set of dual driver headphones and up, you know, $200, $300.
Or even less than that, if you can find them on a deal, get some nice dual driver, you know, for $100, $200, $300.
And then you can do a number of things.
There's a lot of hacks out there. One is a mixing compound. It's two.
It's two makes a silicone mix.
So you mix up two little putties and then you separate them.
And then the idea is that you shove the earbuds and you shove the putty in your ears.
And you shove the earbuds in your ears and you wait for it to set with something in your mouth to keep your jaw open a little bit.
And once it sets, then you take it out and get like an exacto knife for a, you know, you can do it with like a regular box cutting blood.
Or a razor blade. But you want to try to have an exacto knife.
If you can and you cut out the hole for the audio to just let the audio go through that hole.
And you might have to order a couple of sets. Sometimes do a half batch.
And my wife's ear, you can do a half batch and fit fine. My ears a little bit bigger, obviously.
So sometimes I liked if I have it all figured out and I know exactly where to push and not be too close to my ears.
Or actually cutting the sound off in which which way I'm poking the drivers.
I'll try to do a full blown set of that. It's like resin or reason or something like that.
But it's used for like, you know, construction workers and they want custom earbuds up to like 25 dB or 35 dB.
And you can use that as kind of a hack to have your fancy sure, you know, they go, you go to an audiologist and they drip a bunch of wax in your whatever is.
And then they ship that off to shore and then they give you your custom particularly expensive ear buds.
I think they start out at around three, maybe four or something for the nice ones that you have to have like an audio audiologist to put in.
And there's various like hack a days out there on other methods to create that same type of book.
The other method is to get some disposable earpugs and, you know, the memory phone type of stuff.
Excuse me.
And you can take that and kind of do the same method with the silicone.
But you're not going to get as good a seal. Then you have to kind of fudge with the thing and squish it and then shove it in your ear and they're not going to last as long as the silicone.
But you'll actually can see you can actually order a third party earbud, you know, things that will have that same method.
They'll have like a squishy phone and you squeeze it in there and you shove it in your ear.
Sometimes when you order or get new earbuds, they'll actually have that memory phone type of option for you.
If you do have that option, go for it and just hope that your ears aren't funny shapes and you have issues with that.
I've had instances where I've had one size and one and the different size in the other because my ears are shaped funny and everybody's ears are shaped.
Usually not completely symmetrical.
So oftentimes one ear will fall out more than the other.
The other option you have is fancy flack players and they can go as high as like $3,000 for a flack player.
I haven't had one before. I've heard people that have gotten them and I can't justify spending, you know, walking around with, you know, $2,000 or $3,000 worth of gear on my head just to hear music to know that you're just going to run into a wall or hit it or break something off.
So those are an option for some people that will play like flackless audio flack players can be really fancy alternative to like an MP3 player.
The other alternative you have there is an amp.
I'm kind of a portable amp and you'll see if you've got some techie co-workers, they might have next to their desk a little box and that little box is basically an amp for their fancy headphones or earbuds.
And you can purchase those for generally cheap, you kind of have to watch out for gotchas like if you want to get like a really fancy tube driver portable thing.
Sometimes, you know, it's a, it's basically just a light on top of the amp and it's not actually a tube driver, it's just the fake thing.
So ultimately what I really want is a flack player with like a tube driven amp attached to it so I can have like ridiculous amounts of power and sound.
But again, you don't want to be walking around with, you know, eight grand worth of stuff in your pocket just to play to play music.
But anyways, hope that helps out as far as portability goes.
I didn't really just use order a giant roll of Velcro that's double sided Velcro and I'll roll up my stuff in that.
And, you know, over the course of time, you'll collect earbuds and some are better, some are worse and you can give them away to friends and co-workers and trade them out and fix them.
A lot of times you have to figure out the pin outs to that match.
So sometimes I have a pair here that I fixed and repaired but the microphone doesn't work because there's just way too many wires to figure out what goes with what.
But you can look online and usually find the pin out and or just figured out with like a tone generator or a ohms meter or something like that.
So you can, you know, of course, prepare them generally.
But what you have to remember is that a lot of these wires are coated in sort of a plastic coating to protect them.
So when you try to tin the wires, they're never going to tin right because there's that coating on there. And as far as I can tell, you have to use heat to get rid of that.
And you have to be careful not to actually burn the wires and because then you have, you know, oxidation and then they turn black and you can't tin the copper wire if it's, you know, oxidized and black and burnt.
So it's really hard to actually repair these some of these headphones because they're these earbuds because they're very, very small and they're very tiny and they have, you know, six wires going inside of one little hole.
But generally speaking, if you take some time with it, get better at it over time, you can, you know, strip the wires easily.
You can identify using ohms meter, which side goes to what?
And, you know, repairing a $200 set of headphones is pretty much a no brainer when you've got, you know, couple of extra parts laying around.
What I like to do is order L, L shaped plugins. So what will happen generally is that if you're, if you have the device in your pocket and you lean over to something or you're sitting down and you lean over and you hear a crack.
That's because your device is probably shooting straight out and not at a L pattern. So when it comes out of the device, you get that 90 degree bend and that can generally save you a lot of times when there's an issue.
So if you do buy replacement, try to get a replacement, not like your crappy radio shack replacements that are really big and giant.
Try to get a slim as slim as you can L or 90 degree turn bend plug and then also get you invest in some like gorilla glue or if you do have like some like silicon based glue.
But I've used gorilla glue before in a pinch, gorilla grooves pretty good. It acts kind of like a epoxy animal harden, but not to like a crunchy harden.
So I've used that on some to create that smoothness and then also you got your shrink wire to which if you've done any soldering, playing around with shrink wire.
But generally speaking, that's how I'll repair them and sometimes it doesn't, it just doesn't work out. If you have to take the speaker apart and get the driver out, sometimes you just can't.
There's just no way to repair it because you just broke in the whole headphone or the earbud and made a big mess.
Anyways, hope that helps you guys out. If you have any questions, let me know. If you have any comments or suggestions on, you know, dual drivers or anything more than one driver headphones and ear plugs, let me know.
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