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29.11.05

TECH - Headphone Ear Protection Hack

  • headphone hack


  • This low-tech hack requires only the smallest bit of knowledge about wiring and absolutely no expertise beyond that whatsoever. The completed product is a combination of earmuff style ear protectors and audio headphones, allowing the user to listen to music or any other audio imput with hearing protection (I hook it up to my iPod or a guitar player's output feed to I can sinc up to the music while drumming). This is useful for mowing the lawn, or working on a project the requires both ear protection and background tunes. (Check the link for instructions)

    At first I thought this was a silly thing to do, until I realized that I spend upwards of 6 hours a weekend annoying my neighbors with noisy lawn equipment and making myself deaf in the process. I had a pair of ear protectors lying around and a decent pair of behind-the-ear sony headphones I no longer used. I also had a real old pair of broken hi-fi system headphones from the mid 70's that I could never use because it had a gigantor plug that didn't fit not any of my music players. It had sweet head padding across the top of the set as well as some shiny hole grommets that came in useful for putting together my version of the hacked headphones. I ripped apart the two existing headphones. I used the speakers and the wires from the sony and the padding and grommets from the oldy-timers. I drilled holes into the ear protectors, removed the padding, soldered up some wire and crammed everything together. Because of the padding, I was able to snake the wire from one ear cup across the top, to the other ear cup which allowed me to have only one wire dangling down to the mp3 player which makes the new earmuffs surprisingly tangle-free.

    How do they work? Pretty good. The actual speakers sit about an inch and a half from the ear inside the padded cup so they don't really crank, but because of all of the padding inside of the ear-protectors, they don't need to be loud. The ear-protectors do a great job of muffling all of the outside sound and I'm left with pleasant music. But my neighbors, they still hate me.

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