I purchased my Tritton Mad Catz headphones ages ago for my Xbox 360, and they weren’t cheap. My awesome wife just surprised me with an Xbox One the other day, and to my horror my old Tritton headphones didn’t work. They were sweet! After doing some googling around I found that I couldn’t even use the Xbox One adapters that were being sold because I had an old Tritton with a three pole 3.5mm connector, and the new Xbox controllers need a four pole 3.5mm connector. On top of that, they utilize the Apple configuration where the ground is not on the sleeve/base of the connector. Sneaky buggers.

After doing some digging I thought I’d go buy the Xbox One mic/headset thing and just mod it like everyone else. I ran down to the nearest store that would have those items, which happened to be a Walmart. Of course they sell third party brands and all just utilize a four pole connector and not the handy controller connector. So no dice on a nice easy mod. The next idea was to go it alone and find a 3.5mm cable that was four pole. The only thing I could think of was a smartphone headset with mic and controls. I figured that had to be a four pole connector. Got it home and it was! Perfect, now to try to figure out how to mash up my three pole and four pole to get my mic wired up.

The first phase was to figure out how these connectors are wired up. My Tritton headset used the three pole and I was banking on a standard configuration. The Xbox One controller utilized the four pole, as mentioned, alla Apple wiring:

So I cut up my cables and exposed the wiring. To my horror, the four pole had a color scheme I hadn’t seen online. The three pole was your standard yellow, white, red, but I knew I could use it, I just had to figure out which color went to which spot on the connector. As a side note, the brand of headphones I ended up buying were the cheapest I could find: IFrogz with Mic and Controls. I cut off the ear bud that did not have the mic and controls and I cut the cable on the mic side at the mic.

Depending on the coatings, you will either have to strip the wiring or burn the coating off the wires to make sure you can splice them. I didn’t even both to solder since this was an experiment.  Here is how I wired them, and I notated the colors for the IFrogz brand of earbuds (again, with mic and controls):

I didn’t care about audio, I only needed the mic since I had audio piped in through the headphone receiver plugged into the back of my TV.  I simply twisted the wires together and isolated them each with a wrap of electrical tape. Then taped the entire mass together.

It worked! It’s a pain, but it only cost me $10 for the cheap earbuds and 30 minutes with a multimeter to trace out the cables, but it worked like a charm. The three pole goes into my Tritton module and the four pole plugs into my Xbox One controller.