Ipod touch issues resolved

So I'm a known gadget geek. It may even be considered a "problem." I have a lot of great gadgets, and freely admit that I have been an iPod junkie for several years now. First it was the 15 gig white one, that I picked up refurbished from Best Buy.

Then I moved up to the 30G iPod Video, which I loved, except it was a little heavy. So last year I bought an iPod shuffle to clip on my sleeve and wear while I play poker. Then it got drowned in the monsoon during 24 Hours of Booty, so I bought another one. Then I got an iPod Touch around the first of the year, but before long I noticed a slight issue with the touch.

The sound was fuzzy with most headphones and some of the aux cables to jack it into my car. I thought it was something in the odd jack, although it looked pretty normal. Then I thought it was just Apple protecting their brand by making something special about their earbuds so that only their gear worked with the iPod Touch. But when I dropped a couple hundred on my new Audio Technica ANC-7 noise cancelling headphones, I knew that these motherfuckers were supposed to work with the iPod Touch.

But they didn't. I only got one track of audio, and none of the voices while watching video on my iPod. But I had bought the exit row seating on the long legs of my Vegas flights this weekend, so I just put my laptop on the tray table and watched movies. Yeah - the battery on the Macbook lasted long enough for me to watch two movies, as opposed to the battery on my old Gateway, which barely made it though one episode of LOST.

But there's a sound geek here in the office, so I brought in all my shit today and had him take a look at it. I brought the earbuds that worked, the headphones that don't, the audio cable that works in my car, the cable that doesn't, the shuffle that works with my good headphones - everything. After fiddling with it for about 30 minutes, he came into my office, put everything on my desk and said "Do you really want to know?"

I wasn't sure if this meant that I had done something brutally stupid or if it was FUBAR, but I needed to know. I nodded in the affirmative, and he dropped something small and blue on my desk.

A ball of pocket lint that came out of the headphone jack. So there you go, pocket lint may, in rare circumstances, get into the headphone jack and make your iPod sound really crappy with some headphones and cables, while having absolutely no effect on other headphones and cables.

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