Why is it that when a pair of headphones starts to deteriorate, sometimes the voices but none of the other audio disapper? How does this happen?
In: Technology
Yo might notice that your headphones has 3 connectors for 3 wires: left, right, ground. The left side powers the left headphone, the right wire powers the right headphone, and the ground wire makes up the difference because electric current has to balance out.
If the left wire breaks your left headphone stops working. If the right wire breaks the right headphone stops working. If the ground wire breaks, it gets interesting.
If the ground wire breaks, there’s still a complete circuit that goes in the left wire, through the left headphone, bypasses the ground wire, goes through the right headphone, and out the right wire. (or vice versa). But only when the current through both headphones is opposite. When it’s the same, the current doesn’t flow at all because it has nowhere to go. So that part of the current cancels out. What you end up hearing is the signal meant for one ear *minus* the signal meant for the other ear.
For some reason, they usually put vocals equally in both ears. So they always cancel themselves out. Instruments have different signals in each ear, so they don’t, but they sound funny because the sound is all messed up.
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