Losing right-channel soundFollow

I have been constantly losing sound in the right side of my headphones. They will work for a few weeks or months, then suddenly the right side dies. I have gone through three or four headphones this year - Logitech, Turtle Beach, Plantronics, etc. Some had been somewhat damaged at times (cord chewed on one, a used one from brother-in-law, etc) but my new one just manifested the same problem. I have tried both USB and analog. I have and tried both onboard and discrete analog sound devices. I have tried the front and back USB jacks. I have looked into the balance settings on devices in Windows. Currently I'm at a loss. Anyone with any useful ideas?

The fact that it is multiple ports and multiple sound cards is odd. With that being the case, its almost certanly got to be a pinch point on the wire or a strain point of some sort. How do you put away your headphones when you are done with them? do you hang them by their cord? are you frequintly plugging into the socket and removing the plug? if so, do you grasp the barrel or do you pull it by the wire? What gauge headphone wire are we talking here? have you tried them on a completely different socket and see if the issue is actually with the headphones or with the PC? If it were just the one sound card i'd say the balance slider in audio settings somehow got set all the way to right or left (generally under mixer settings in windows, one slider controlls most output devices)

A stereo headphone jack is generally composed of three parts. A tip, a ring, and a sleave, or TRS. Those three contact poihnts are what lets the plug recieve a different signal for left and right. As polderan mentioned, if you pull a stereo plug out far enough and position it just right, the ring contact point will bridge to the tip and basically create a mono signal in both ears. GFenerally the right ear is going to be wired to the portion of the plug that goes furthest into the socket, and if there is any possibility of damage, it will be the one to fail, and its usually an indication of socket wear rather than a damaged cord. On the other hand, cords do nwear easily, especially if the wire is very light gauge, and if it is passing by your computer in such a manner that there is a pinch point. if the headphones are older, you may wnat to replace them. If you plug them in and out frequently, you may also want to replace them.

If it was just the one port, I'd say its the socket itself. Dust can cause it, so you'll want to blow the socket out with compressed air. It's usually wear, and the only way to really fix it is to replace the socket. There are some workarounds involving aluminum foil wrap on the plug, or opening up the case and bending the contact springs down further, but generally if you are oipening up the case you should replace the component anyways. If it is a laptop, sometimes they are smart enough to put that socket on a daughter board that can be replaced without soldering or replacing the entire motherboard. that really depends on the manufacturer though.

Huh. Close to a simul-post Kao, i didn't see your response earlier.

I've been running the cords differently. Some of the headsets run from the PC (under desk) right out to the front of the desk. The latest one (the newest) I had run up the access hole in the back of the desk, but that caused a bit more tension since there was less slack. I don't hang them by the wire, I just gather up the wire and dump the headphones onto the desk. There was an old set that got chewed on a bit by cat and/or babby, but that didn't start dying until after about two years. The others have no noticeable damage and lost channel after only a few weeks.I don't plug/unplug them at all until they start to die and I start trouble-shooting.

Now, onto something else I've noticed: my son has his own laptop in the living room and he uses cheap headphones to listen on. Those also have been losing the right channel after a few months, but that I had been attributing to abuse by children (his four year old cousins will fight over the laptop and headphones). So apparently I've passed on a gene to my son that kills the right channel of headphones.

All of the new headphones start out working fine. I don't think these are iPod-specific headphones, just cheap PC headphones. The laptop in question is a Lenovo Thinkpad.