The RR1 repair kit took less than three hours to design. Testing it on all the broken Rifts sent to me by the community took a bit longer.
TL;DR: The RR1 repair kit can repair the busted audio on your Oculus Rift. I will send one to you for free. Vive la VR revolution!
The Oculus Rift CV1 is not perfect. Some issues are the result of carefully considered design tradeoffs, but others are design flaws that did not become apparent as such until well after launch. Eventual failure of the complex electromechanical assembly that gets audio from the Rift to your ears is one of the latter.
This issue and the root causes are well documented across the internet, so I will limit this post to information that is actually helpful. In short, long-term use of the Oculus Rift CV1 often leads to failure of important electrical paths in a specific ribbon cable that winds through the strap. For most, the failure is limited to the ground (GND) trace for the right headphone audio module. This sometimes develops into a full audio cutout for both ears, though that is less common. The RR1 repair kit can address both types of failures, and has been designed so the average PC gamer will have no problems with installation.
As of this post, Oculus seems generally willing to replace headsets with this failure as long as they are under warranty and in a supported country. Unfortunately, the longtime Rift users who are most likely to suffer from this problem are usually well outside the warranty period. Even so, the first step for any user with this problem should be to contact Oculus Customer Support and see what they can do. In some cases, you might just need to clean some contacts, tighten the connection between your headphones and straps, or fix your PC’s sound settings. If you are unsuccessful in resolving your problem, please forward your ticket and a mailing address to RiftRepairOne@gmail.com, and I will send you an RR1 repair kit free of charge so you can get back in the Metaverse as quickly as possible. Oculus Customer Support, feel free to direct customers who are out of warranty to my kit.
The RR1 comes with more detailed instructions, but here is the gist: The kit works as an external wiring harness for the Oculus Rift CV1 that can be configured in a variety of ways to address a variety of different failures while running in parallel to the existing electrical system. Most people only need a common ground between their right and left headphone audio modules – just slap the wiring harness on, slip the bypass discs between the pogo pins on the headphones and the strap receptacle, you will be back in business! Users with full audio failure will also benefit from the ability to drive entirely from external audio sources, both wired or wireless. The kit weighs about 32 grams, but because the weight is rear of the facial interface and close to the head, you won’t be able to notice the difference. Please note that the RR1 cannot fix failures in the ribbon cable that affect the rear Constellation tracking LEDs.
The kit can also function as a third-party headphone adapter on fully-functional Rifts, but I don’t have any plans to distribute the kit for that purpose – I am doing this because I feel bad for people who bought a Rift from me and can’t use it properly anymore, not to make using third party headphones slightly more convenient! Maximizing the number of people in the VR ecosystem is also important to me, and the people who have been using their headsets for years on end tend to be among the most engaged, most valuable users who dump tons of money into the content ecosystem. Properly functioning, high quality audio that does not rely on fumbling with third party headphones and cables is an important part of getting users to regularly engage, and the market research bears it out – there is a reason everyone is building audio into their headsets, even companies that initially doubted the importance.
Big thanks to everyone who responded to my call on Reddit and Twitter for broken Rifts, this would not have been possible without your help. (Before anyone gives me shit for ripping people off, please know that I paid everyone enough to buy a new Rift+Touch for themselves in their native country)