Repairing the headphone jack on a Zen Touch?

[gamer_jason]

The headphone on my Zen Touch is loose, but I don't have the receipt or anything unfortunately. Now, I've decided to open it up and get a look at it, but I can't see any obvious solder joints. Now, it's a very tight space in there, and I don't have much soldering experience so that might be why I can't identify the pressure on the thing in a certain direction, either pushing the jack itself or using the male end of my headphones to apply the pressure.

So, would anyone be able to help me? Even just telling me what kind of store would fix this for me a for a nominal fee would be okay; I tried to find out what Creative would charge for the out-of-warranty repair but they freaking wanted $20 just to let me ask.

 

[South_Korean]

where did you get it? where ever you did, maybe they have your purchase date and everyhting on commputer and state your name and number etc. to proove you bought it.

 

[MIKEp]

if u opened it they problably would tell u that the warrenty is void (if there's a broken seal)

 

[jonnywolfet]

no soldering needed, use a small hook to bend back the faulty connection. left ear dead= contact right at the bottom, right ear= middle contact. the top contact is the ground.

 

[TheChuckster]

It's actually not as tight as you think it is. I managed to push down on the slot next to the headphone jack and pry in a small flat head screw driver (one of those tiny ones you use to fix eyeglasses with) in the tiny crevice between the white enclosure and the black piece of plastic. This opened up enough space to prop open the jack permanently with a flat, thin, and tiny piece of plastic.

So then I found a water bottle with a plastic cap on it, and I took the cap off and cut it so that I had a nice flat piece of plastic from the top part of the bottle cap. I took it from the flat part on top of the cap, and just threw away the round part making up the cylinder. I stuck the rectangular piece I cut out from the cap into the slot right there next to the eyeglasses screwdriver that I was using to wedge it open a bit. Then I took the screwdriver out and pushed in the plastic as far as I could with my thumb. Only a little bit was sticking out, so I took a fingernail clipper and clipped it. Then I put some tape over top of it so that the plastic would not fall out no matter what. (Although it would take quite a bit of force for it to become unwedged from the tiny slot). Now I can hear out of both headphone ears since the plastic is applying enough pressure to hold the faulty solder joint into place.

So much for Creative and their poor job of soldering their headphone jacks onto the PCB. This is not a rare problem... if you Google search, you find a ton of people with Zens (Micros, Visions, Touches) that have broken headphone jack soldering. It's a shame because the sound quality on the Zen Touch beats out just about every other MP3 player (with the exception of maybe Cowon D2).