How do I tell which wire is which if I have a copper wire, red and green coded wire? Is the unshielded copper wire ground?
Headphone wire color coding
colour-codingspeakerswire
Related Solutions
There are no industry standards for that kind of thing. The colors are unique to that product. Therefore, it is unlikely that anybody will know, remember, or care. The best way to figure things out is to carefully disassemble the headphones, noting what is connected where. From that info you can put it back together the same way.
Yes, all of the conductive stuff inside the cable is copper. However, the copper wires are coated with a very thin insulating layer called enamel.
The enamel can sometimes be removed by rubbing molten solder on it.
If this doesn't work, then you might have some luck rubbing some fine emery paper on it.
As you can see, you don't need to clean your fingernails before you do this.
But one of the problems with headphone cable specifically is that it often contains some thread to reinforce it.
The thread makes soldering the cable pretty difficult. Usually, if I find threads in my cable, I just throw it away.
Best Answer
Red is for Right. Blue (or green) is for Left. Copper is for ground (I remember this with the mnemonic Red Right bLue Left Copper Common). All 3 are coated in a lacquer you need to burn or scrape off before you solder. With standard headphone plugs, with the plug facing away from you, the right pin is right, the center pin is ground, and the left pin is left.