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That's really weird o.o The adapters should just be metal and plastic, same as the cables.
Maybe they have a really weak connection internally, ie high resistance? This might lead to both lower volume in the headphones and (in some circumstances) higher noise, especially if it's an unstable resistor.
I recommend starting a shelf of cursed items :)
I love this idea, and am going to start doing this hahahha!
This could end up competitive.
Invite people to your house, give them a tour and briefly mention the shelf before scurrying them on. Watch their faces contort but don't give them the opportunity to ask any questions.
EDIT: I have a vague guess at what could have gone wrong with your adaptor. It might have had OK L and R contacts but a broken G contact. You would then hear the difference between the L and R channels, which most often sounds like garbage. Music would be weird (entire instruments/vocals disappear) and mono audio would be silent or near-silent (so you'll have to turn it up a lot and will hear noise).
Hahaha!! Like a random red door on the back wall of the basement. "That's just 'the door'. Nothing to worry about, as long as you keep your distance" and quickly walk them off with no further explanation. Hahahahaha
That makes sense. I used to get the adapters from a local shop where I used to live, and they were cheap cheap. Converted to USD, they were probably around $0.10 a piece. He gave them out free when you purchased headphone. After a while I got tired of the static and low sound quality, so I just got a cable (3.5-6.35) on ebay, and it's been fine since.
The quality of random no-brand audio cables, connectors, adapters etc. tends to be right-out atrocious. There's technically going to be metal in there but that "nice", thick headphone cable that came with those cheap headphones (and even some decent ones, like AKG K240s) is going to consist mostly of insulation, not conductors. Plastic is quite a bit cheaper than copper.
You can get ok jack adapters for 80ct but honestly I wouldn't trust that thing if I didn't trust Thomann. Usually I'd be looking for Rean when wanting a cheap one but they're apparently not in stock. And I kinda doubt Neutrik or Hicon even produce them if you're spending five bucks on a 3.5mm jack you're not using adapters, you're soldering the exact cable you need.
Oh. Back to resistance: Doesn't really matter audio quality doesn't care it's still the same AC signal just with less amplitude which you can fix with the volume knob, You're looking for impedance and material boundaries have a habit of being bad for it, as well as signal quality as parts of the signal will propagate through the boundary and parts will reflect. For more information ask an actual electrical engineer I merely wrote an A in a course I had to take and can tell the hot end of a soldering iron from the cold one (it's the one with the cable).
Only for ideal resistors.
Resistors are noise sources. Intentional resistors tend not to be too bad (and probably won't be heard in this situation unless you have super-high-impedance headphones, perhaps 10's of K), but unintentional resistors (eg corroded unstable metal contacts inside a plastic part) can be atrocious.
A few things to add to this:
(1) If your resistor acts even slightly like a diode then you will encounter partially rectified RF signals (more noise yay). Metal oxides between metals can do this, eg if the connector has crimped two badly-plated bits of metal together.
(2) Plasticisers in some plastics can leak out, causing corrosion on unseen internal metal parts.
(Of course linking all of this together is just conjecture, the causes of Moss' bad adaptors might be something completely different)