How to make balanced cables with Neutrik?

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hedgeland

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I've searched this BBS high and low looking for some info on exactly how to build cables with no luck for my specific questions, so here goes.

First of all, I just bought 50' of Mogami balanced cable and bunch of Neutrik NP3C 1/4" plugs. Now, what the hell do I do with them? Specifically...

1. What kind of solder do I use? I have some general purpose solder from Home Depot. Is that good enough?

2. The Neutrik connectors look somewhat complicated to me. Anyone have a website where I can see exactly how these things go together? I think I can figure it out, but I want to make sure.

3. The most important question I have is how exactly do the cable wires solder to the Neutrik connector? By that I guess what I mean is not so much how to solder, but is there anything different about these Neutrik connectors as far as how the wires attach to them? Am I making sense here? The posts that you solder to look different from other connectors I've used in the past so I didn't know if you deal with these Neutrik connectors differently.

Thanks y'all,
GG
 
Making your own cables is a very important subject....its a way to get high quality cables for a good price.....somewhere here needs to post a "Making Your Own High Quality Cables" so we dont have to link to a competitors website.....anyone?.....Bueler?......
 
solder

As for the solder, I prefer .75mm diameter solder. It's not at all important really, but its likely smaller than the the stuff you get at home depot and easier to work with.
 
I've read "rosin core" solder is what should be used, and what I have used. Unless there is something better I don't know about, which is entirely possible, if not likely.
 
Thanks for the input!

I checked out the links you posted, tdukex, and they're very helpful. I did some more searching with Google and found a few helpful ideas, but nothing specific to these Neutrik connectors, so I think I will wing it and see how it goes.

GG
 
Love 'em or hate 'em, Neutriks are by far the easiest connectors to work with. They are very straightforward. The first rule (just as with any connector!) is "Always slide the strain relief shell on over the cable before stripping, tinning, or soldering". How many times have I finished a beautiful cable and looked down to see the strain relief on the bench- so I get to unsolder everything and put the damned thing on...

With the Neutrik XLRs (and also their standard 1/4" TS and TRS plugs), the connector is in 4 parts: the strain relief "nut", the internal clutch (the black split collar), the connector insert with the pins, and the connector bodyshell. The internal clutch and connector body are installed after the insert is soldered to the cable: so as long as you get the strain relief nut on *first*, you're in fat city. Much easier than the old Switchcraft, ITT/Cannon, and Amp XLRS and 1/4s, where you have to make sure that _everything_ was slipped on the cable first (giving you 3 times as many ways to screw up)...

Slip on the strain nut; strip, tin, and solder the inert to the cable; slip the clutch sleeve on and mate it to the insert (there are key pins on the insert and clutch that you will match up); line up the key pins and slide the shell on over the insert until it bottoms; screw the strain relief nut onto the body until snug. Done. Less than a minute.

The only Neutrik clutch-style connector that doesn't follow that rule is the longframe telephone-style 1/4" TRS patchbay plug: the connector shell has to go on the cable first, just like the bad old days. But nobody'll ever probably use those but me, anyway.

If you have a lot of these to do, consider making a cable soldering jig: drill a piece of sheet metal and install a male and female XLR and a 1/4" jack on it. That way you can clamp that jig to your bench, and plug the inserts into the mating connectors to keep them from rolling around as you try to solder them. If you make more than 5 cables, the jig is worth it- it'll be a tool you'll use for your whole career.

For those who want to use starquad (this is for you, Queue!): there are 4 center conductors: two in one color, two in another. Strip and tin the matching conductors together, so that you have only 3 resulting wires, and then solder up the cable as usual. The Canare starquad I use has two white and two blue conductors. So I connect the pair of whites to pin 2 (white:hot), the pair of blues to pin 3, and the shield to pin 1 as usual. The only difference with starquad is pretinning the two sets of matching connectors together, so that you can treat them as a single conductor when soldering them to the pin.

I always use my own mnemonics for conductor assignment: white:hot, red:hot, or if there's no white or red, then light:hot (the "lighter" color conductor is always hot/tip). Don't let that stop you, though: as long as the shield is on 1 or sleeve, and you do the same thing on both ends, go crazy!

Fun, no?
 
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Yeeeehaaaw

Thanks a lot skippy!! Now that's a reply you can sink your teeth into! I think as far as a workbench goes, I have an old Black & Decker table top workmate (they don't make them anymore, unfortunately) that I used to use 15 years ago to make model airplanes. It has all kinds of clamps and stuff to hold just about anything still while you work on it.

I loooooove this BBS!

Oh, I think I've posted this elsewhere, but a good place to buy bulk cable like Nogami and Canare, and bulk connectors like Neutrik and Switchcraft is a place online:

http://www.electroniccity.com/shopping/

From what I've seen, the prices are pretty good. ($0.63/ft for Mogami, min 100 ft; $2.98/Neutrik NP3C connectors, min. 11)
 
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I just looked at the link Queue posted. Some of the Mogami quad cable has 4 different colored conductors. That's pretty damned antisocial of them- I should have mentioned that, since I do have some of their miniature quad console cable, and it is in fact laid up that way. In that case, you need to check the order of the lay in the cable: You want to use opposite "points" of the star for tip and ring, respectively, to get the benefits of the balanced quad. So if the conductor order, looking at the end of a fresh blunt cut, is red-black-white-blue, going clockwise (the BBS software collapses out the whitespace that would make this ASCII graphic work, which is why I used underscores):

___red
blue___black
___white

you would use red and white for tip/2, and blue and black for ring/3. That's one place where my mnemonic could screw you up: you need to check out the cable first, just to be sure. The Canare (and the other Mogami) quads are laid up like this:

___white
blue____blue
___white

which makes it fairly obvious.

Here's another link with more info: http://www.canare.com. Their braindead frames won't let me post the direct link (it gets a 404)- so on their homepage, push the button for "cables", then the button for "microphone and audio starquad", then the button for "the starquad story".

Also, bulk cable and connectors can be had for very reasonable prices at http:www.markertek.com, and www.mouser.com, and www.partsexpress.com, and a bunch of others as well...
 
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Skippy,
Thanks a bunch... When I get around to doing this, I'm gonna make a cool little tutorial, pics and all...

Queue
 
thanks Skippy!!!!!!....

wheres the full color diagrams:eek: :D
 
I hereby delegate them to Queue! (;-)

I mean, jeez. You gotta remember that you're talking to a multimedia-illiterate dinosaur here. I still use ASCII emoticons, fer cryin' out loud, and the couple of times I posted pictures from my wife's digital camera, I nearly herniated my infandibulator. Shoot, it was only about 2 years ago that I even started admitting that the Web existed!

One of these days I really do have to figure out how to cut and paste that newfangled graphical multimedia stuff and make it work here. But meanwhile, Queue'll do a better job anyway, and I can give the bruising on my infandibulator a little longer to clear up...
 
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