Confessions of an audio dentist

Extracting troublesome Bluetooth headphones with the help of a soldering iron and a steady hand results in one much happier web call participant

- Dick Pountain

I love music and I love soldering. Here is a story that has both. I've explained my opinions about hi-fi here several times: I like good sound quality but I'm not a hi-fi nut, don't buy oxygen-free cables or onyx cartridges or gold-plated anything, and definitely didn't colour in the edges of my CDs with a green marker pen. I won't spend thousands on any component, and if you happen to have issue 330 to hand you can read how my listening was transformed by connecting a cheap Fosi Class D Bluetooth amplifier to my vintage Castle speakers (legacy items from when Dennis Publishing used to publish Hi-Fi Choice magazine).

All sound from my Chromebook Plus gets routed via Bluetooth through these speakers and I remain delighted by its quality, but a problem arose. I have to attend regular Zoom committee meetings, where we discovered that my Bluetooth remote arrangement was causing irritating echo effects for the other members, so I decided to resort to headphones. I bought a set of moderately priced JBL wireless headphones, which solved the echo problem but also created a slight annoyance for me because the dreaded Bluetooth wouldn't automatically switch itself on; I had to manually disconnect the Fosi amp in Settings and select the JBLs.