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The Xenta Wireless Headphone set is a relatively cheap but very effective way of listening to music or the television while not disturbing others. It’s range of operation is very good, even in a different room, through several walls - a range of tens of metres.

So what happened? How did the headset switch fail?

The on-off slider is a piece of black plastic which slides on runners in the left earpiece casing with two prongs which locate on an internal circuit board slider switch. One of the two plastic prongs had broken:

To access the inside of the headset you have to peel off the earpiece cushion and then prise off the ring that it sits on. This ring is fastened by 4 clips to holes in the body of the earpiece - shown by the red lines in the photos below.

To get inside the earpiece a number of small screws need to be removed, five on the headset and three attaching the over-head linking bars. You can then separate the two halves and expose the circuit board which carries the switch.

You could try to mend the slider prong. But experience tells me that it wouldn’t be strong enough and would quickly fail. You could try to extend the circuit board switch slider so that it reaches the perimeter of the headpiece and is then directly accessible from outside the headpiece. I rejected this for the same reason.

Hang on, there’s room inside the headpiece to fit a separate switch if I could find one small enough. I could:  

Found a big enough space near the existing slider hole, soldered the switch in parallel with the existing switch, re-assembled and it all works. (Except the headphones initially were permanently on. Doh. Switch the original switch to off with a thin screwdriver!)