Fix fading sound in Apple's in-ear headphones

Feb 09, '07 07:30:02AM

Contributed by: dancriel

After going through three pairs of Apple's in-ear headphones (replaced by AppleCare) I finally decided to find out why they were going bad. All of my in-ear headphones would eventually lose most or all sound in one or both earbuds, somewhat suddenly. I took them apart to find that the speaker itself was still nice and loud; the culprit was a small amount of wax embedded in the fine mesh in the cap of the earbud. Disgusting, I know, but I kept the headphones extremely clean and they still became clogged. I've read about many people having this same problem on other forums, so here's how I fixed it.

Notes: You don't have to blow through it using your mouth. That's what I did, because I don't have any compressed air, which might be a better solution since I can't comment on the potential toxicity of the dried glue left on the open end of that endcap. I did this and haven't died, so, uh, Q.E.D. Also, you might as well do both earbuds at the same time here. Even if one seems OK here, it's almost definitely got some amount of blockage that you can clear.

So there you have it! You've saved yourself a phone call if you have AppleCare, and $40 if you don't. It's amazing how such a tiny amount of junk can block almost all the sound from those speakers.

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