i wasn’t planning on blogging this so i don’t really have pics during the actual work.

the problem: not all 4 of my speakers were outputting sound. i have a 4.1 system and it’s divided into two plugs — one for the front 2, one for the rear 2 speakers. i could wiggle the wires and sometimes the other speaker would kick in, so i knew there was a break near the plug. it’s a pretty common problem caused when the cord is bent too much and the wire inside breaks.

how to fix: going down the cord from the plug bending the wire in different ways, i pinpointed where the break was. for both cords, it was within 2 inches of the plug. now the scary part… snipping the cord on my speaker system. i had done a practice run on a pair of cheap headphones that came with a $5 mp3 player, but i knew they wouldn’t be the same.

after snipping i strip a bit to see what it’s like.

the two insulated wires are the left and right channels and this is pretty much what i expected. what i didn’t expect was the ground to be around the other wires. not a huge deal though. i stripped more (an inch or so) and just twisted the grounding wires into a single strand. i also stripped a bit of the smaller insulated wires (like 1cm). i had purchased a gold stereo plug from radioshack — it had screws so i didn’t need to solder anything. i needed to check which connection was which audio channel though. so i built a makeshift continuity tester –

connect one of the free wires to the tip of the audio plug (left channel) or mid section (right channel) and the other to one of the connections to see what’s what to make sure the left and right audio channels work right. the LED would light up if it was the same circuit. the left connection ended up being the left channel (makes sense). so i made all the connections and assembled the plug. i did the rear speakers first and then the front. no problems.

so here’s the finished product (the two gold plugs). they’re connected to a splitter, and the splitter is connected to a coiled extender (think telephone cord). so i just plug that extender into whatever i want (laptop, tv, game consoles) and the gold plugs don’t have to do any moving around, which will help prevent the same problem from happening again. using the splitter, it’s obviously not true surround sound (the rear just mirror the front stereo channels) but in the future, i may run it through my computer’s audigy sound card — i could then get surround sound from ps3 using fiber optical wire. i’m not doing this now because i’m missing the cable that connects the audigy’s front end to the actual sound card.