You don’t need me to tell you how easily earphones and headphones tangle and what a pain it is untangle them. The reasons that earphones tangle so easily is that there are three “ends”, two ear-buds and a jack. To stop things from tangling we need to reduce the number of “ends” or make the ends less likely to wrap around the rest of the wires.
To stop earphones from tangling we simply need to tie the ear-buds and the jack together. We can do this by folding the wire in half to bring the back to the buds and then put a knot in the cable near to that end. Slip knots are good for this because they’re easy to undo but will stay in place long enough.
The undo the loop, hold the ear bud end and pull gently on the other.
See the video above to see this done in action or visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smFXKx-oQhY.
This is sufficient if you’re just storing your earphones and don’t want them tangled when you next need them. If you’re carrying them around you might want to bundle up the wires a little.
To do this, roll up the remaining wire, wrapping it around your hand if it helps. Then slide it through the loop you made at the ear-bud end. To keep everything in place, pull gently on the ends of the wire to tighten the loop.
To unbundle the earphones slide the wires from out of the loop end and undo the loop as described above. Again, the video below should make things clear (or visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8eZlcTep7w).
update: 03-Feb-2010I’ve received comments that this approach will damage wires. In which case I still recommend this approach (as it’s effective) but only if the longevity of your earphones is compromised more from tangling or if the annoyance of tangling over the lifetime is less than that of the headphones. It’s possible to be a lot more gentle than shown in the videos, but it’s difficult to see what’s going on.
This took a while to get, because the video was too fast for me to follow. Thank goodness you had the step by step how-to page attached. Now i’ve learned this nifty trick and will never suffer tangled headphones again!
Thanks again!
This is a nice approach to keep earphones from tangling.
However, as other readers have pointed out, this approach may damage the wiring of the earphones.
Also, the first video doesn’t apply to earphones with long wires. I have seen that you take care of that on the 2nd video but it is a more complex process.
Personally, i just wrap the earphones around my hand and then wrap the wires with the wire itself (It looks a lot like the way earphones are packed without the tape or plastic wire)