So, I have fairly low-quality headphones, but I use them a decent amount. They're absolutely great, and were cheap, but they have a volume control in the middle of the cord that has a tendency to lose after a year or so, knocking out either the left or right sound. Now, I like stereo sound, but the thing that really bugs me isn't missing the left track, it's missing the left ear of sound. It's really distracting having sound come only from one direction.

I cracked open the volume control and started connecting pins until i found a combination that put the sound being sent to the right speaker to the left one too. It turns out just about any combination worked, and it didn't matter how many you crossed, as long as you didn't cross any of the data wires to the power wire. So I found some conductive material (on a pin I got from an engineering event actually. Nice irony (not quite the right word, but i'll use it anyway) there) and wedged it in connecting a few pins.

After closing the case back up I noticed that it still had enough room to fall against the wall that was the "top" when I was putting it together. So I cut a piece of the foam stuff in the box that the pin came in, and stuffed that in there to keep in place. It works pretty well, and, while I don't have stereo sound, I can at least not be distracted by silence in one ear.

I may try completely cutting out the volume control later and simply bypass it. Will update if I do that.

Update: Success! Kinda.

I cut the cord, and reconnected the wires. For the process on that see the captions on the pictures below. I plugged them in, and got beautiful stereo sound!...for about a minute. Then a loose connection elsewhere in the wire reared its ugly head, and I lost half the sound again. This time the problem is somewhere in the bundle of wire that I never use...but I can't tell where. The weird thing is it's extremely sporadic, and I can't pin it to an single spot. I think if I try to fix them again, it will be by grabbing some more wire and simply replacing the majority of the cable that is left.