Female XLR jack, male-to-male patch, then female-to-miniXLR to Microphone

[Viejo]

Hey, I'm mostly new to using XLR equipment, other than just running a single cable between a microphone and my equipment.

I'm currently volunteering at a school in Costa Rica. My supervisor was trying to buy cables to connect some microphones to some videoconverencing equipment, and he accidentally bought female miniXLR to female XLR cables. We needed them to be female miniXLR to male XLR to correctly connect to our equipment. I told him that we would need some male-to-male XLR connectors to make those cables work with our equipment. We have finally got the connectors in (they often take several weeks to ship things to us in Costa Rica) and I connected them together and no sound comes through the cables. I checked the microphones with other cables, and they work great, and I know the equipment works great too.

He bought several cables and several connectors, and I checked a number of combinations, so I don't think that they are faulty cables. Are there some strange electrical things that happen inside male-to-male or female-to-female cables that I haven't taken into consideration? Like, are their diodes or resisters in there, making it so this set up won't work?

Since we live in a place where it is hard to ship in new parts, I can't just run to a nearby recording store and buy other cables to replace these.

 

[Alton42]

Balanced?

Hey, I'm mostly new to using XLR equipment, other than just running a single cable between a microphone and my equipment.

I'm currently volunteering at a school in Costa Rica. My supervisor was trying to buy cables to connect some microphones to some videoconverencing equipment, and he accidentally bought female miniXLR to female XLR cables. We needed them to be female miniXLR to male XLR to correctly connect to our equipment. I told him that we would need some male-to-male XLR connectors to make those cables work with our equipment. We have finally got the connectors in (they often take several weeks to ship things to us in Costa Rica) and I connected them together and no sound comes through the cables. I checked the microphones with other cables, and they work great, and I know the equipment works great too.

He bought several cables and several connectors, and I checked a number of combinations, so I don't think that they are faulty cables. Are there some strange electrical things that happen inside male-to-male or female-to-female cables that I haven't taken into consideration? Like, are their diodes or resisters in there, making it so this set up won't work?

Since we live in a place where it is hard to ship in new parts, I can't just run to a nearby recording store and buy other cables to replace these.

It could be that you're mixing balanced and unbalanced cables. Balanced will have three wires connected in the plug, unbalanced only two connected.

 

[Viejo]

Thanks a bunch for the reply. I ended up testing it with a continuity (sp?) tester and out of the three wires in the cable, numbers 1 and 2 were reversed in one of the ends of the cable. I'm not sure why that was, but they looked like they were machine-created to be like that. Any wiring diagram I could find on the internet showed 1 matching with 1 on the other end, and 2 matching with 2 on the other end, but this one was 1-to-2 and 2-to-1. I ended up unsoldering the big end (XLR) and manually swapping the wires back around and resoldering them together. From all the testing I've been able to to after that, they seem to work fine now.

Thanks again,
Viejo