Fix Your Oculus Rift’s Audio Issue Using Palmer Luckey’s Free Repair Kit

The Oculus Rift will soon be celebrating its third anniversary, helping launch high-end virtual reality (VR) gaming into the world. Like most pieces of hardware, it hasn’t been completely smooth sailing, with customers experiencing issues that sometimes only appear once a device is in the hands of the public. One such problem for Oculus Rift users is audio failure. Today, Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey – who left in 2017 – has released his own repair kit. Dubbed the Rift Repair One (RR1) kit, Luckey aims to help those customers who have experienced the audio cutting out on one or both headphones due to the nature of the mechanism employed. Luckey explains via a blog post that: “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.”Most commonly this tends to manifest itself via the right headphone failing, however, in rarer cases, both can lose signal. Normally, should this happen to a newer Oculus Rift then the best course of action is to contact Oculus Customer Support who tend to replace the device in most cases. If your headset is an older model then this is where the RR1 can come in handy. Palmer isn’t handing these out free of charge to anyone who just wants one. You still need to contact customer services first and get a support ticket, plus he does advise: “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.”