Solving Palm TX Headphone Hiss
19 10 2006My feelings toward the Palm TX have been almost completely positive since I bought one earlier this year. Early this week I encountered an utterly infuriating problem - the device emits an unmistakable “hiss” through the headphone jack! Read on to learn what to do about it.
Strange as this may sound, I’ve owned my Palm TX for over 6 months, and until this weekend had not once plugged in a set of headphones. It was my realisation that I could listen to Podcasts via Pocket Tunes that changed all that. When I did, I was shocked to discover that a high-frequency noise was produced from the jack - something not present through the loudspeaker. Thinking my el-cheapo headphones were to blame, I tried a pair of Sennheiser’s. The latter’s superior frequency response made the hiss even worse!
In desperation, I went back to the place of purchase to compare my unit to the store demo model, hoping to cash in on my extended warranty. There was no difference. A quick Google on the topic revealed that this “hiss” was a well-known problem with Palm PDAs. Thankfully, there is a (somewhat dirty) fix:
Headphones with an in-line volume control
OR
An in-line volume attenuator / resistor
So why does this work you may wonder? If you listen carefully, you will notice that the volume of the noise is constant and unrelated to output volume. As a result, the hiss is most noticeable when listening to soft audio in a quiet room. In loud surroundings with the volume cranked it becomes almost imperceptible. The trick then is to maximise the signal to noise ratio (SNR) by maximising output volume, and then attenuating the output enough to eliminate the lower-volume noise. Too easy!
Australian readers can pick up the pair shown above from Jaycar Electronics (Cat. No. AA2017) for less than $19.95 (currently on sale for $12.95).
The difference this simple solution makes is remarkable. Being just slightly obsessive-compulsive (and born to an electronics engineer), this blatant engineering defect was enough to make me consider changing my PDA. I am now, once again, happy and at peace with my Palm.
Hey there,
Do you have this problem: you can’t push the headphone jack all the way into the Palm TX? I recently bought a TX and it’s great, but I can’t ever push the whole metal part of the headphone jack into the socket on the TX. I have tried like 5 different earphone/headphones and none of them are slim enough to be pushed into the TX, because of the little “ridge” that is built around the socket.
Thanks
I haven’t encountered this problem. I’ve tried a number of headphones and they all “click” and lock when pushed far enough in. There is a millimetre or so of the jack that doesn’t go in, but this is well above the contacts.
I know this may sound stupidly simple, but perhaps you have something jammed in the socket. I’ve done this before and the culprit is usually trouser lint.
Hope you work it out. Let me know the outcome!
Andrej
I thought you had modded the audio codec / amplifier on the Palm T|X to eliminate the hiss.
Sorry Rudd-O. That would certainly be the best, albeit messiest, solution. There was no way I was even going to think about going there!
http://1src.com/forums/showthread.php?t=122858