Third party headsets are unusable on the Xbox One until Microsoft releases an adaptor, which won’t be until next year. Your Trittons, your Turtle Beaches, your Astros and Afterglows, forget it. Except one audiophile, a guy with a soldering gun and a purpose, wouldn’t let it go.
Reader alsybub says he made his Xbox One compatible with his Tritton cans in about 15 minutes. “I simply opened up the headset connector, de-soldered the standard headset and soldered a 3.5 mm jack cable to the same points,” he writes. “It looks like a product you might buy in a store, and it should work with any headset.
“It took around 15 minutes to complete.”
We asked alsybub to show his work and he provided the following photo and description. “To open the casing you can literally just pull the back off. There’s 5x Torx screws underneath, to open it. No warranty stickers or anything.
“It’s the four wires at the top right. With standard 3.5mm stereo wiring you solder, from left to right, Red, Ground, Green, Ground. The ground is shared by both connections (ie 3.5mm uses three wires 1x Red, 1x Green, 1x Ground) so I split it and covered them with heat shrink.
“There is no loss in quality or volume,” he says. “It’s perfect.” Moreover, “You could easily exchange this with a 2.5mm socket and use any 360 headset.”
Update: Another reader, David. N., did the same thing and provided this step-by-step on Instructables.com.
If you hate using the disposable-quality chat headset included with the Xbox One, and have a soldering gun and a sense of adventure, maybe give it a shot? If you ruin it, you can always use the microphone on the Kinect sensor for chat audio while you wait for third-party support.
Even if this mod is basic soldering 101 stuff, I’m impressed by alsybub’s determination and unwillingness to take no for an answer. And if this swap is so easily made, I think it fairly asks Microsoft what consumer benefit is created by the Xbox One’s different standard for audio devices.
To contact the author of this post, write to owen@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @owengood.
Comments
17 responses to “Modder Solders His Own Xbox One Headset Adaptor”
I did a similar mod, broke out headphone and microphone to separate 3.5mm sockets: http://blog.damonpollard.com/xbox-one-headset-adapter-diy/
No rocket surgery here.
Final product: http://blog.damonpollard.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/WP_20131124_031.jpg
Nice job.
Microsoft? Consumer benefits? Bahahah
It’s so you have to buy M$ branded adapter for $39.99
When I was pulling it all apart I thought the adapter/headset plug looked very similar to a mini-hdmi port.
Wouldn’t hdmi be the perfect standard to use for an interface? What other good options are there for digital audio? S/PDIF?
Optical
The consumer benefit will come when you can connect a 5.1 headset directly to the controller without any other connections. The whole point of the new “high speed data port” as I understand was to allow it to pass all your audio thru the controllers wireless straight to the headset. Of course the mono chat headset that comes with the console only has the basic connections, it doesn’t need anything more, when the high end headsets come around it’ll be a different story.
‘Audiophile’ is not the word I’d use to describe users of Tritton or Turtle Beach headphones.
Yeah. I was really devastated when I forked out nearly $300 for a pair of Turtle Beach headphones.
I -wish- I’d spent more time before throwing the money out.
That being said, I checked out a friends Astro headset and that was quite lovely.
Good point.
It doesn’t say that anywhere…
Third sentence. 😛
Glad he cleared that up right before soldering on an after market part. I think they are gonna be able to tell.
Seriously considering this, I can’t stand the one ear headset.
…Why don’t you just use the kinect? If you have a home theatre, it’s pretty silly to not use the kinect. Just talk normally, and then the sound outputs via the same speakers.
My wife doesn’t appreciate hearing every 12 year old has sex with my mother.
Good point.
Hack a G27 steering wheel to work on xbone and ill be really impressed…