Yeah... I bought the first pair & spliced in a quarter-inch phone plug. (wasn't thinking !). I bought another pair (for posterity) & found a homemade "connection board" on ebay, that used the "Fahnestock Clips", & it was only $9.95 (with free shipping). It's easy enough to homebrew one & you won't have to try & alter the original plugs. Just use a regular quarter-inch Jack w/wire on one side & the original plugs on the other.. Now I have an unmolested NOS pair of these nostalgic earphones still in the box/bag & unopened. Lots of good memories with these. I remember we "initiated" a new intercept operator, on his first the mid-watch, by rubbing the carbon from a piece of 6 ply copy paper all around the inside of the earphones ! It was a "rite-of-passage" & he wouldn't even know why other ops were grinning every time he took the earphones off ! He wouldn't know that he had "black ears" until he finally looked into a mirror... At times, we were standing watch 8 hours on & 8 hours off & it was easy to spot who hadn't taken a shower Good times,... U.S. Navy Morse Intercept Operator 1964-1972. dit dit
OUCH! Another zombie bit NNF...but this was a pretty good thread. I almost always use earphones for CW. Always have since I was a teenager. Which? I've got expensive (to me) Heil Proset Elites here I use happily on phone, but what I generally use on CW is an el-cheapo pair of earphones from JVC. I maybe paid 40 bucks (at most) for them on Amazon. Why do I use them? Good audio...nice earpads...but...most of all? As comfortable as Heil Proset is, the JVCs are so light I can wear them for hours and hours and hours.
In the olden days us old pharts used these adapters to go between pins and panel jacks. No need to cut the leads.
I use phones when copy get rough. My old Heil set gave up the ghost so I found a really nice Sony set on Amazon for about 40 bux. Using Amazon for ham radio products, who would have thunk?