Should I connect the shield to wire 1, or to the connector itself? I've heard both ways, and that one or the other can cause feedback or noise to get into the system. Can you explain why you say to connect the shield to the ground wire, and not to the connector?
Old guy here. Been soldering for 40 or so... Make sure your don't cut any strands. If you do? restrip. Thats why you want a service loop. Tinning wires? make sure you can see every strand. Clean your tip. Fill the XLR cups. Soldering should take no longer than saying solder. Clean your tip, wet your tip with solder, and turn it off with a wet tip. Heat the thing that you want to solder to, with a wet tip, Not your wire.
I love hearing our Transatlantic cousins butchering the word 'solder' into something like 'sudder'... Enough teasing, this is a great video and extremely helpful :)
4:22 Unless your cable has a drain conductor, in which case you can safely snip away the shield. Also in some cases (like Canare L-4E6S) the shield is quite massive and only a portion of it is retained for pin 1.
Hey man! You have some really useful videos man, really appreciate your work! Could you possibly do a video on hearing compression or any kind of exercises one can do to practice it (like the one you did on frequencies). Would be super helpful!
I plan to make a video on dynamic range and compression in the near future! In the meantime, you can practice hearing compression with the same tool I showed you in the ear training videos! There is a compression test tool too! Here it is: webtet.net/apcl/#/compression
Great video and I will no doubt use this to help me with my cables as they seem to be outrageously expensive to buy a good cable (if you can find one) these days. Also just wondering about how Neutrik seems to have a monopoly on all connectors and effectively driving prices up. They seem to be buying out all the competition out and thereby price fixing. Surely the monopolicies commisiion should intervene.
Military grade soldering calls for going through the whole. Making a wrap of the wire, then soldering. At least throughout the 60's. I may be wrong now.
I hope you see my concern. I saw the manual of qsc amp I'm using. The balanced xlr shown to their manual is a bit confusing. The wires 1,2 and 3 on the amp side are all connected while on the other side of xlr only 2 and 3 are connected. Is there any reason for it? I hope you see it. Thank you
Probably for 2 reasons: 1) to avoid ground loop 2) amp has connection to the ground and will pass any interference induced signal to the ground while the source (guitar maybe?) has no connection to the actual ground. You only need hot and cold signal OR hot+ground OR cold+ground to pass the signal (if you have both hot and cold you don't need the ground actually) so with balanced connection shielding grounded only on amp side. Unless you don't cause ground loop in your line it should be OK to use regular wire with all 3 pins connected.
If I reversed this, could that work as an inverted phase/reverse polarity, whatever it's called? Why do I want to know? My sound card lacks a button for the inverted phase/reverse polarity for my microphone, so I thought of getting a “xlr adapter cross wired reverse” for this, if it would work? I don't know if it would? If it would also, I think of maybe turning one xlr cable I have lying around into one, so I don't have to order one of these adapters.
One more. Once your cup goes liquid, put your wire in. When that goes liquid, stop, remove iron. Stand still and watch it color over. Then let go. Done
I have 2 XLR female inputs connected to the circuit board of a Behringer Europower PMX 2000 mixer/amp which aren’t working. I think the pins inside these connectors are no longer making contact with the male pins of the mic cord. Can this be corrected without changing the female input? Thank you
Probably being a bit anal here, but after you have applied the soldering pencil to the joint and then remove it, I find the wire wiggles just a little before the joint sets, as it’s hard to hold the wire perfectly still. Can this lead to a cold solder joint because the wire is moving a bit?
Can (or how do) I cut the connectors off of a dvi-d cable (or any old cable) and replace the connectors to a 1/4in (ts, trs)? Is this possible? I have some high quality cables and would like to convert/recycle ♻️ cables to by replacing the connectors. Any input is appreciated. Thanks!
You’ll need to ensure the cable you’re using has a shield and the appropriate wires. Some cables use much smaller wires than are recommended for audio cables.
Definitely not! Consider the situation where you pick up two XLR cables to mate them, one in each hand, and there is an electrical fault in something one is connected to the other end... You get a shock straight through your heart! Pin 1 of a chassis XLR should be connected directly to the chassis, not the signal 0V, and the cable shell will be connected to the chassis too when mated and will overlap the cable shield. The correct recommended professional practise is outlined in the AES48 standard.
Yes. You can use it for line and mic signals. However you can't use it for old passive speakers that use the xlr connection for amplified signals. They used to have xlr where now speakon is the standard.
Which is male and which is female jack? After soldered figures must be shown clearly as it is our main purpose here. When cutting there was no white colored wire but when soldering there it is, why? In your diagram the colors are red green and black but in actual there is no green and black. This tutorial is confusing.
Yikes. Dude, clearly you're not inclined for this. The diagram isn't meant to say "LITERALLY ALL CABLES WILL BE THIS COLOR", it's just a random color coating. Not to mention it's quite obvious which is male vs female. Just look at the pins 🤦🏻♂️ and a simple "male XLR" into Google would easily answer your question. Your condescending complaining is ironic considering how ignorant to this stuff you seem to be.
Regarding the diagram, the insulation around the conductors isn’t guaranteed to be any particular color configuration, but using green, red, and black to indicate ground (pin 1), hot (pin 2), and cold (pin 3) is fairly common. In this case, the best way to ensure you’re soldering wires to connectors correctly is by using an electronic multimeter to test the opposing connector for Ohms/continuity. Regarding the “white colored wire,”if you actually watched the tutorial in its entirety (a whopping 6 minutes and 40 seconds), you would know why the color of the copper shielding changed to “white colored wire.” Go to 5:05. Finally, you’re watching the wrong tutorial if you’re asking about jack genders and needing a closer look at after-soldered figures that are already shown sufficiently. But, the jacks on this broken transformer are both male (which you can see in the video), meaning the connector is female. You can also tell at the end as he assembles the connector. Best of luck.
Ah ain't nothing wrong with Cannon XLR's, they were the first and are still very good connectors. Of course don't buy crap anything, lots of Cannon fakes out there. If it cost $1 it's worth a $1.
![How To Solder XLR Microphone Cables [Step-By-Step Tutorial]](/img/logo.svg){kind=logo}
