If you have a favorite pair of over-the-ear headphones you may want to consider upgrading them with a wireless option. The key word here is “option” because these still retain their functionality as a wired headphone. This is nice if you only want to deal with battery life when you’re actually roaming around.
Of course the thing that makes this type of hack work is the extra room inside the body of the earpieces. [Tony] cracked them open and decided there was just enough room to fit the internals of a Bluetooth audio adapter. It has it’s own Li-ion battery (boasting 12 hours of use) which is why there is an added charging port. To fit the board he had to remove some of the aluminum body from the enclosed part of the headphones. He also wired up a tactile switch to act as the power button for the Bluetooth module.
Details are scarce on how the speakers are wired between the module and the jack. But we think he simply wired them in parallel rather than using a switched jack. You can see a quick demo after the break but it really doesn’t augment the build details at all.
Sorry for not writing how the module was wired in the thread. The bluetooth module is wired in parallel to the original 3.5mm input wire. -Tony
I always wanted to do this to my old Motorola S9 bluetooth headphones.
that would be the opposite of this hack. taking already wireless headphones and adding a wired option. it boggles my mind how so many bluetooth headphones exist and how so few have the wired option as well. seems like a no-brainer.
oh, no, youre right, the article and title are just written poorly.
wait, no, I am right. these previously were WIRED, he made them WIRELESS. why was this so difficult to communicate?
I would like to add a WIRED option to my Plantronics 995H too!
I have a pair of Sennheiser HD 205’s that I would like to pull this off with, but I am happy just with having the 3.5mm port that I modded into them. Was not happy with the massive amount of cord they came with, and having this removable cord option was the best that I could ever do.
with any decent headphones (or ears) modifying the internals to accommodate additional circuitry (or anything really), and therefore changing the sound dynamics of the cup the driver sits in will most likely adversely affect the sound. just sayin’, before you go chopping up your nice headphones.
What I don’t like about bluetooth, is the 200ms or so delay it adds to all sound. It’s fine for music, and movies with a player compensating for that, but quite bad for gaming and completely useless as a monitor.
I’d like to see a hack like this, but with something different than bluetooth, without that much delay. Maybe an RF24 transciever, hooked into an arduino?
Then, making it a triple-option (wired, RF24, BT), would be real cool.
But there is the whole size issue.
That’s a really good job, they look great. The only advice I would have is that you could probably flash the BT module to whatever name you wanted it, using a USBasp device. Here’s a link: http://www.hobbyist.co.nz/?q=bluetooth-module-configurations
Wish this would work for me. My headphones are true 5.1 surround sound requiring 6 channels.
How do they fit on your head?
Most likely they are accepting 5.1 format and mixing it down to 2 channel or maybe two drivers per cup. Which is a total waste of our hearing, they tried that back in the quad era. Most good sound cards etc. have software modes for headphones often with real binaural ( infinite channels in 3D) instead of just 5 channels of mono tracks. Games take advantage of this. True 3D instead of penta-phonic inside your head.
Jack should be wired to cut out the BT when using a hifi source, the loading of the idle amp can screw with the medium impedance signal.
Really? Headphones are 32 ohms, what’s the impedance of a turned-off amp? I’d have thought quite high bit it’s not something I know a lot about.
Still, as you say, switching stereo jack sockets are really easy to get hold of, it’s just a matter of using the right pins.