Introduction: Turn an Old Telephone Handset Into DJ Headphones!

By contactmicrophones.com

These cool old phones are easy to find and cheap to pick up, we got this Brown Beauty at the local Salvation Army for $7 which was a complete ripoff. Shame on you Salvation Army. If I was an evil rich, would I be shopping at you?

Anyway, these old brutes look good and sound good, but often don't really cut it as a home telephone unit choice. The connection is bad, the numbers are sticky... Time for retirement? NO! Time to show your DJ boyfriend you care about him by making him an extra cool DJ monitoring headset while he's away in New York City!

You'll need:

-An old telephone handset with cord attached
-A soldering iron and some solder
-A mono male phone plug (yes, they are really called phone plugs baby)
-A sharp utility blade

Step 1: Cut the Cord

First things first, chop off that cord as close as possible to the telephone base.
Now you have a cordless phone and a phoneless cord!

Step 2: Expose Some Wires

Now carefully remove about 1/4 inch of cable jacket from your cut end with the blade to expose four wires. Two white ones, one red one and one black.

You can trim off the black and red wires, we won't be using them here. They carry the signal from the mouthpiece back to the base. You can hook these up to a simple electret preamp and have your own telephone microphone instead.

Carefully remove about 1/8 inch of cable jacket from the ends of the two exposed white wires. Be extra careful because in this case anyway, the wire inside was just this flimsy flat copper coil stuff.

Step 3: Make the Connection

With the soldering iron, tin the ends of the two white wires. Slip the jacket of your mono plug onto the cable and you're ready to hook this sucker up!

As per the diagram, the speaker ground line will be opposite the red wire and the hot line will be opposite the black. Solder the white hot line to the tip of the plug, and the white ground to the ground. Obviously.

Step 4: You're Done!

Plug your new headset into any stereo or mono output jack and for the first time use the phone without any obligation on your part!

Use it to cue up tracks when DJing and intimidate people into thinking you're 'on the phone' and they should NOT try to talk to you! This REALLY WORKS!