Cables (don't hurt me)

O

omnipotent

New member
I'm planning on making my own cables, but have a few queries.

There are four sepperate cables within the cable, two of each color, which conects to where or doesn't it matter?

Do TSR's and XLR's use the same cable?

Anything else i need to know, speak now. I will be using starquad cable, with neutrik connectors.
Thanx,
omni...
 
Well, there's no real color convention for audio- but you should be as consistent as possible, to keep yourself sane. I've always used black (or the darker of the two, if neither one is black) for cold, and the lighter one for hot. The only time I violate that rule is for terminating multipair cable on a patch bay, and we're not talking about that here.

For TRS-XLR connections, wire tip (hot) to XLR pin 2. Wire ring (cold) to XLR pin 3. Wire the shield (sleeve) to pin XLR pin 1. TRS-TRS connection are the obvious straight-through (tip-tip, etc.).

TRS insert breakouts on most boards these days put the "send" on tip and the "return" on ring, but *not always* (that'd be too simple). Check the doc for your gear to be absolutely sure. YMMV.

Wiring-wise, you just grab the two conductors of the same color (from opposite points of the "star") and treat them as a single conductor. This makes doing TRS connectors a little bit of a pain in the ass, as that is a fair amount of rope-salad to get into the connector shell. Neutrik connectors make this much, *much* easier than the old Switchcraft-style crimp/heatshrink strain relief...
 
Thanx skippy,
Thats just what i wanted to know, now i just need to teach myself to sloder.
Also, are stereo jacks (ie. headphone cables) the same as TRS's (I think I read somewhere that they wern't)?
Cheers,
omni...:D
 
The jacks are identical- only the function is different (which can led to lots of amusement when you accidentally plug a TRS balanced line send to the board into the "headphone out" jack on a piece of gear...). Normal convention for headphone outs is that the left channel is on the tip, the right is on the ring (which is how you can remember it: r->r), and the sleeve is the common return from both channels.

Here's a very nice reference to look at for many common wiring tasks. I just found it in the past few days, and it'll save a heck of lot of typing for me in the future...

http://www.rane.com/note110.html

It's the best "how-to-plug-everything-into-everything-else" page I've seen (the bottom half of the article), and the top half has some useful information on hum, buzz, ground loops, and other wiring cooties.

One caveat: I only agree with about half of what they say about ground loops. Pleas understand that their information isn't wrong, per se. I simply believe that some things can be done better than they describe here. But as a basic text for Studio Wiring 101, there is _much_ to recommend this page...
 
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