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Gear / Technical Help => Cables => Topic started by: gkatz on August 06, 2010, 09:52:10 AM
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I happened to see a 20' roll of this at big lots of all places, for only 8 bucks, so I picked it up because I wanted to make an extension cable, going 1/8 stereo female to 1/8 stereo male. This cable is "star quad" configuration and I was wondering how to wire it. this cable has the bare ground, and two blue wires and two white wires, along with the shielding, etc... for some reason I though star quad cabling was only for XLR. any guidance? Im looking for which wires go to tip, ring, etc..
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I happened to see a 20' roll of this at big lots of all places, for only 8 bucks, so I picked it up because I wanted to make an extension cable, going 1/8 stereo female to 1/8 stereo male. This cable is "star quad" configuration and I was wondering how to wire it. this cable has the bare ground, and two blue wires and two white wires, along with the shielding, etc... for some reason I though star quad cabling was only for XLR. any guidance? Im looking for which wires go to tip, ring, etc..
I usually just double up the leads, you know twist both blue and both white together,
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It doesn't matter which colors you use just as long as they are connected to the same solder points on each connector ;) I use blue for pin two (+) on xlrs, only because it rhymes ;D. In this case I would use blue for tip, white for ring and ground.
I do the same thing with quads as Robb.
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thanks robb that's what I needed to know.
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One question... how do you pronounce Canare?
I've heard it pronounced as CAN-AIR, and CAN-AIR-E
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i always figured it was like the bird :P
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Kuh-nar-ee
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White = Hot is my convention. Doesn't matter though, whatever works for you as long as you are consistant. Shield is always pin 1 on the XLR's though.
Really at BIG LOTS???
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Really at BIG LOTS???
I know seriously, it was the last one too (maybe the only one hahah)
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so I built the extension cable, works fine. Now I want to make a dual XLR to dual RCA cable. My understanding is that this would leave me with an unbalanced cable? websites say that I should solder a link in between pins 1 and 3 on the XLR, than wire pin 2 to right on the RCA, than do similar for the other channel.
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Correct. The cable will be unbalanced by connecting either the + (pin2) or - (pin 3) to ground. Both signals are identical, but they are out of phase with each other.
In recent history there was some confusion over this so the AES picked pin 2 as the "hot" wire.
Amongst AES members it became a joke about which pin was hot. Someone came up with a game spinner that had two landing spots. Pin2 hot or Pin3 hot. ;D
The important thing is that if you consider pin 2 the hot wire you connect it to the center of the rca plug.
Connect 1 & 3 together at the rca barrel and solder it to the ground lug.
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thanks! is it the same idea for a stereo TRS cable?
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Sorry... but what is on the other end of the TRS cable? and how is it going to be used?
Usually a TRS cable will be used as an insert to a mixer where one channel is used for send and the other for return. But it can also be used as a stereo plug too. In both of these cases wire tip to the center of one the cables and the ring to the center of the other. Sleeve connects to the sleeve of both cables. I usually mark the cable that has the tip with red to identify it. This is also the convention that Hosa uses in their patch cables.
If you are going from a TRS to a single XLR, then tip goes to pin 2, ring to pin 3 and sleeve goes to pin 1.
These Rane notes are good for reference for wiring and cover additional techniques for reducing noise.
http://www.rane.com/note110.html
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thanks alot those notes really help.