Microphone adapting for PA

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littlemerl

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I have an old Dukane PA that only has screw terminals for the microphone input. There are 3 screw terminals, 1 for low-z, 1 for hi-z and a common terminal in between. Can I hook up a 1/4 mono phone jack to these terminals for plugging in a microphone?

Thanks
 
I don't think so. Post a picture of all items involved. Maybe an adapter is what you'll need.
 
Actually you can, but why not wire an XLR? pin 1 and 3 to common and pin 2 to low-Z. It won't be a balanced input but it should work fine. If you do want a jack for a mic wire it so that tip goes to low-z and ring to common.

By the way If you want an instrument input you may find wiring a jack socket so that tip to low-z and ring to common will probably work fine also.

Alan.
 
Good point on the XLR plug. I have both kinds of cables so it doesn't matter to me that much for this application. Your wiring scheme seems to agree with a simple diagram I found on the net. Also, I hadn't thought about the instrument plug but I might try that as well. Thanks for the input. :)
 
If you hook up both sides of an XLR to those connections, you'll lose most of your signal. Remember that the pins on the XLR connection are opposite polarity, so the second wire would be taking away signal from the first. And that's assuming they're even in phase with one other, which they might not be.

You should either hook up either the plus side of the XLR to the "low-z" (and the ground to the ground) or run the signal through a matching transformer and hook up the resulting high-impedance output to the "hi-z" connection (and the ground to the ground).
 
dgatwood said:
If you hook up both sides of an XLR to those connections, you'll lose most of your signal. Remember that the pins on the XLR connection are opposite polarity, so the second wire would be taking away signal from the first. And that's assuming they're even in phase with one other, which they might not be.

You should either hook up either the plus side of the XLR to the "low-z" (and the ground to the ground) or run the signal through a matching transformer and hook up the resulting high-impedance output to the "hi-z" connection (and the ground to the ground).
Click to expand...

You're making it too complicated, connecting the + to pin 2 of the XLR and having both pin 3 and pin 1 connected to the common is the standard way of connecting balanced to un-balanced without the need for a transformer. This is exactly what happens when you plug a balanced TRS jack into a un-balanced TS socket, the socket connects the -ve and the ground together.

There won't be any phase issues as we are talking about a mono microphone. OK in the ideal world you could make a balanced mic input circuit/transformer, and install XLR's, but the question was, "I have an old Dukane PA that only has screw terminals for the microphone input. There are 3 screw terminals, 1 for low-z, 1 for hi-z and a common terminal in between. Can I hook up a 1/4 mono phone jack to these terminals for plugging in a microphone?" so I don't think there is going to be any high tech audio from this PA, just a PA that can be used for a jam or small gig.

Alan.
 
Ah. I misread your post. I thought you meant to connect the plus to hi-z and the minus to low-z. :)
 
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