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My laptop is producing sound in one headphone ear only?


nameless_girl

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Posting about this here is a long shot, I know, but I've already done it everywhere else yesterday with no replies having been provided yet and I'm beginning to get desperate. :cry: My laptop has developed an issue where it only produces sound from one ear of my headphones. I'm sure that my headphones are alright as I've tried plugging every pair I have into the laptop, and the issue is there with all of them. I can trick the laptop into producing sound from the other ear of my headphones if I twist and turn the headphone wires a tiny bit, but that's only a temporary fix. Is there any way to permanently fix this myself? My laptop is eight years old and all warranties have expired long ago. Obviously I'm not going to attempt to open it up and muck around as if I were a professional, but a few of these issues are astonishingly easy to mend, and I was wondering if this is one of them. I've fiddled around with my laptop to mend the ventilator previously and I've also opened up my mouse and a few of its other extensions to mend tiny things before.

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I would imagine the input for the headphones on the laptop is either dirty or has a loose wire or something which would make sense if you are twisting your headphones and getting some noise intermittently.

I would try cleaning the headphone port on your laptop but aside from that I am not really too sure.

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I had already done that with wet wipes before I posted about the issue anywhere, but it didn't fix anything at all. I was thinking that the issue might be in one of the joints in the laptop that interact with the headphone jack, but I don't actually have any idea how I ought to go about mending it if it is. :unsure:

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Definitely sounds like an issue with the mini jack audio output if the sound works intermittently. If it wasn't working intermittently then it could well be the balance etc - but you can rule this out.

Just double check with another set of headphones etc - some suppliers aren't as strict on the size of the barrel of the minijack as others.

R.

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This is not a rare problem, these little jacks break or loosen inside to the point that the connection is no longer stable. If you can order a replacement and have a steady hand, you can do some solder work to take out the old and put in a new connection.

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You can try opening it and doing it yourself, but it's really not the easiest thing in the world to do. I've fixed a few friends' up - you need to be able to solder and have the right part, etc.

Unlikely that it's worth it. Much better solution for you if you're desperate is to purchase some USB speakers or a USB sound card and then plug your headphones into that. :)

http://www.amazon.com/Channel-External-Sound-Audio-Adapter/dp/B0027EMHM6/ref=sr_1_2?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1278216914&sr=1-2

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Thank you loads. I was going to lengthily go pester a few engineer friends to guide me through mending the jack joints myself because us theorists are utter rubbish at anything practical :tongue2: , but considering the cheapness of that external sound card, I might as well purchase one of those instead. I thought they were a lot more expensive. The only issue with that would be that I like having things in my laptop mended instead of sidestepped, but I suppose I could always mend it at another time, when I'm more informed.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I've got a problem with one of my sound systems, one of the channels (the left one) wouldn't work at all, and while it did give me a new perspective on a lot of songs after a while it got annoying. What I did was change the output to mono so I'd get the full sound on the right-hand set of speakers. It's not the same problem as yours, but it's a bit related.

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