Lenovo T440s Replacement Headphone Jack source?

[ratdude747]

Tore town my Lenovo T440s to see if I could find a compatible 3.5mm headphone jack... No dice. Very common failure from what I've seen online.

Pics attached. Didn't find anything on eBay or digikey... Did find a reference to a currently-deleted AliExpress listing but obviously that's of no help.

[diif]

AliExpress.

[mon2]

Yes. One supplier on AliExpress says they are out of stock. I think they get them off donor boards.

Have you tried a contact cleaner? Or is your connector defective? Someone on reddit posted this fix.

[ratdude747]

Originally Posted by mon2

Yes. One supplier on AliExpress says they are out of stock. I think they get them off donor boards.

Have you tried a contact cleaner? Or is your connector defective? Someone on reddit posted this fix.

I did try contact cleaner... to no avail. I ended up replacing it with a T460s (so I could afford to take this one offline to service the jack).

I do have a dead beat up T440 in my drawer... if they're just harvesting jacks from donor boards, perhaps I ought to do the same. Wasn't sure how easy recovering a jack intact would be.

[ratdude747]

Was able to desolder the jacks and swap the dead board's jack over... and no change. Right channel still dead.

Must be a faulty sound chip... bleeping lenovo Oh well... sadly, the three places I though I could use this thing (my wife, my dad, and church) all need working 3.5mm audio and I'd prefer to avoid USB adapters. Heck IDK.

[ktmmotocross]

find broken headphones and add probes to one headphone.now u can findaudio signal from chip i it works

[ratdude747]

Posting from it: Looks to be a software issue... as on a reboot to Windows 10 (it's a dualbooted arch x64 and 10 x64 setup) I am getting sound on both channels just fine (with a fair bit of intermixing, almost seems to mono but I am getting some left/right separation). Before the jack swap, my headphones didn't seem to plug in right and I had a dead channel on both OS's.

I used a different audio setup on the Arch install on the T460 the succeded this (converted from pulseaudio to pipewire; needed better graphic equalizers to band-stop a gnarly harmonic issue with that particular model)... may try that. Otherwise, I dunno... Depending on what happens with this thing it may end up as Windows 10 only.

I'll upload some pics tomorrow (well, later today technically )... funny enough despite being footprint and dimensionally compatible, the jacks were different manufacturers and very different construction. Hopefully that's in my favor!

[ratdude747]

Fixed on Arch too after switching over to pipewire and updating things.

Didn't have time to mess with pics... got called in to work this evening.

[ratdude747]

Pictures:

The "new" good jack is on the left, the "old" bad jack is on the right.





Notice that the bad jack has a lot more exposed copper... not sure if that's to blame. Seems the "S" jacks are good, and the "Suyin" jacks are garbage?

On the repair itself: I was able to wick everything but three of the four shield/ground plane joints (two on the new jack, one on the old jack. I was able to use some tweezers to carefully heat and wiggle the shield joints to extract the jack; the shield bent and fell off the old jack in the process, more evidence of it being a cheaper flimisier design (I straighened it and reinstalled for the pictures). Once removed, I was able to use a pick and some wick to clear the remaining shield hole. Soldering the new jack was uneventful. I needed everything my 60W iron could give... these flush through holes combined with modern lead free solder and heavy ground planes (on the shield joints) made things tricky. Several holes required multiple wicking attempts (where each time more of the lead free solder was mixed with and removed by the 60/40 leaded solder I was adding).