Friday, June 19, 2009

Fixing Skullcandy Skullcrushers




So if you're fixing these headphones, and want to keep the amp, grab your soldering iron and some wire cutters and a lighter and lets get down to what you have to do

The picture below thats a mess and the colors are messed up! Well here's what will make your life a lot easier if the 8 wires from the headphones got ripped out of the amp, if you take some small wire from a scrapped USB cable...etc, and you solder it onto the leads, and then you solder them to the leads on your skullcrushers, you will have a more solid connection then if you hooked them straight to the board again because they could get yanked and with the fatter wires they are there to stay more likely. If you did solder sucessfully to the board, concider putting some hot glue or gorilla glue or any kind of take to secure the wires in case they will get yanked out again...cos you dont want to have to do this 14 times like I did.

In order to solder to the skullcrusher's wires, you must first get rid of the protective coating on the wires, go outside and burn off about 1/4" to 1/2" of the stripped wires, but leaving enough to see what colors they are and watch out, the fumes are stinky dont do that inside, and dont let the flame travel up the wire so shake it once it burns enough.

I had to run the ground off of the negative battery terminal, but whatever works works right?

If you cant get the amp to work you're not out of luck yet, with the stripped wires of a stereo cable, just solder (twist if you dont have any solder) the wires to the specified wire, the bass will kind of work, you'll have nothing hanging on the wire, and you'll have headphones again. Fortunately for me, I figured out if I put a volume control knob managing the blue and red wires then connecting to thier connections on the headphones, I was able to pump up the bass but turn down the headphones for quite a cool effect. Make sure you prepare the wires by burning off coating or they wont conduct the electricity. Tape it up and get on with your life, if you had trouble, try hooking everything up with the headphones on :).


If you have a soldering iron, and enough wire, you can solder directly to the headphones/subs in the ear pieces, this is what I had to do with my left sub, so I have speaker wire running down the side, but in theory 4 wires coming down for each side and wired to thier corresponding place could work just as well, just might look messy.

If you do fix the headphones without the amp, someone told me that skullcandy gives you a 50% off coupon to thier online store for any product as an agressive listening warranty as long as you send them some identifiable piece of the broken product, sweet right? So like 35 for new ones.

I hope this all makes sense, I wrote this because I've probably spent like 30 hours fixing them. Feel free to comment if you have any questions you think I can answer.