Saturday, September 01, 2007

Audio Meltdown

My HP iPAQ rx3715 PocketPC has been acting up again lately. The headphone jack would sometimes work, some times not. Or the right channel would work, but not the left. A week ago, I had to push the headphone plug to get any sound at all. I don't have the money to get another MP3 player, so I went into my usual obsess on it until I get it working. I did get it working. Sort of. I had to open the thing up and work on it. I learned a good bit about audio jacks.
For instance; if you point the audio jack tip up, the tip is the left channel of the stereo sound, the center of the pin is the right channel, and the start of the pin is the ground. I realize that information will never help me in life again. Anway, the left channel connection in the audio jack 'female' receptical wan't working well. Seems HP did a funky design on it to make the on-board speaker come on when you pull jack out. But the design just isn't very good. If I could learn to solder, I pull a good jack receptical out of something else, and solder it in that. I don't care if the on board speaker works anway. I just want the headphones to work. But, since it's giving me problems, I'll have to get something else.

I've decided on getting an iPod Shuffle. At the moment, I'm not too happy about it. I'd rather have an all-in-one solution, but that's not available yet. At least not with the features I want. The iPod Shuffle is almost indestructable. About the only way to kill it is run a car over it. Twice! It so light that if it falls, it barely even gets a scratch. It's only 1 GB, but I don't need much storage space anyway. I have less than 50 mb of music, but have enough podcast subscriptions to keep at least 20 GB around, and about 50 GB of audiobooks. I don't care to carry around every song I've borrowed either, but I'll gladly listen to the books I've purchased. Or the free ones.

When I get it, I'll give a review.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think Radio Shack might have replacement receptacles, but like you said, you'd have to solder it into place. I usually draw the line at soldering; if it takes that level of effort to get something to work, I consider it junk.

On the other hand, if you know someone who could solder it for you, that might save you the cost of that iPod Shuffle. ...