What is a "audio jack outlet" called?

Ignoramus24925 fired this volley in news:xcudnUbFp4nQYubRnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:

The female is the jack, the male is the plug.

You want a panel-mount jack.

(whatever size it is, but it sounds like a 1/8" miniature jack)

LLoyd

John Fields fired this volley in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

That might be what your personal business's colloquialisms are, but that's not standard usage.

I have cable jacks, and I have bulkhead plugs. The sex is the _only_ thing that matters.

LLoyd

snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

The rule is that the powered side shall be female for safety.

Whether it's called a jack or plug is left up to the draftsman or PC board designer unless the engineers concern themselves with that low level of detail. Usually they didn't and I was in charge of all system interconnections by default.

In vehicles both sides may be pigtailed with the connectors tied down for vibration resistance and the electrical contacts can be hermaphroditic like Anderson Powerpoles, so the distinction is meaningless.

jsw

The term "Jack" comes from "Jacking in", as in the headsets folks used. The US mil nomenclature, perhaps borrowed from early Brit RADAR monikers, is what has been around for a long time. Connectors are either panel or bulkhead mounted, or flying lead mounted. The cables that connect to them are nearly always "flying lead" variety, with the exception being a hard mounted "plug" on a slide tray.

They are ALL "connectors" but the idea was so that anyone looking at a schematic would know right away what kind of hardware was associated with a given schematic element. Not everyone that uses schematics are engineers, or have the common sense to know when a link between two schematic sections is a detachable cable. So we provided yet one more element to ease that lack. The really sad thing is that it never got made into rules or fully embraced or implemented, so we have folks that have no clue about it, and no common sense to figure it out.

Not true. Only certain connector families have the no-gender/cross-gender capability.

You must be one of those dopes that just shoves it in anywhere... anyway.

There's a Sgt in Wichita they just arrested for that today.

--- To _you_ perhaps, but rather than argue with you let me refer you to:

documentation you may not be familiar with.

Notice on page 2 that connectors which are designed to be affixed to a cable are called "plugs" and connectors which are not are called "receptacles"

Notice also that, curiously, the MS3454 and the MS3456 are equipped with inserts that house sockets, while one would expect that, under your definition of "plug", the MS3476 would be equipped with pins.

Such is not the case, however, and whether a connector is called a plug or a receptacle (jack) depends entirely on the configuration of its shell.

Now, proceeding to page 25 of the catalog, it appears that the contacts are designated as "pins" if they're male and "sockets" if they're female.

This, then, determines the sex of the connector, since for any given contact arrangement the connector can be populated with either pins or sockets.

For example, on page 29 under: "MS/Standard how to order" we have an MS3456L16S-8PW, with the 6th position identifying the contact type, in this case a P(in), making the connector's sex male.

It could just as easily be an MS3456L16S-8SW, in which case we'd have a plug filled with sockets, making it a female plug

some other possibilities which exist would be the case of an MS3452L16S-8S,which would be a box mounting receptacle filled with sockets, or an MS3452L16S-8P, which would be the same receptacle filled with pins.

So, it's clear that the sex of a connector has less to do with its being called a plug or a receptacle than whether it's the plugee or the plugger.

A less esoteric example I gave in another post was that of the female connector on the end of the cable which connects the AC mains to a PC. A plug, yes?

--- JF

John Fields fired this volley in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Not the pins themselves, but the sex of the apparatus, et al. The AC cord you mention is a plug, because it is the male component of the connection pair, even though it has female connections in it. It inserts into a receptacle -- a receptacle we would never call either a "jack" or a "plug", for reasons below.

The terms "Jacks" and "Plugs" don't apply to general interconnection devices, anyway. They traditionally apply to audio connectors. Iggy was asking about a connector nominally designed for audio connections (although not used for that purpose on his tool).

The terms come from early telephony application slang, one application of which was to connect a cord to a panel, but another which was to bridge connections IN the panel by inserting a shorting plug (sans flying wire) into a hole. They "plugged" the hole to complete the connection. Thus, anything on a switchboard going into a hole was a "plug".

I never heard, read, nor figured out why the hole was called a "jack".

LLoyd

Most of the time you use a male plug for many things. I guess all my male/female extension cords have nothing but plugs. I'll still say my extension cords also have jacks. Audio connectors don't usually have high voltages to worry about unless its 70 volt, or connections to an electrostatic speaker, or electrostatic headphones, but I try to keep power feed lines female.

My sink also has a plug attached with a chain, but there is no jack.

Nice troll.

Now why not piss off?

Gunner

I am the Sword of my Family and the Shield of my Nation. If sent, I will crush everything you have built, burn everything you love, and kill every one of you. (Hebrew quote)

Only in weird places like the USA...

English for electricians:-

A Jack plug is a male TS or TRS connector.

A Jack socket is a female TS or TRS connector.

If it's any other type of connector, it isn't a Jack :-|

If it mounts to a chassis then it is a chassis mount jack socket. Chassis mount jack plugs are almost unheard of, but line mounted jack sockets are often used for extension cables.

They were used in telephone exchanges for many years before people started using them for other things.

They are now available in 1/4" 3.5mm 2.5mm. 1/4" was the original telephone jack size.

That's the English English version, by the way :-)

Mark Rand RTFM

The AC mains connector on your computer???

rts

hus,

I found this:

Also, look at #3 in this as to the base etymology:

It then goes on to refer to connectors a bit further down.

ts

Bwuahahahahaah! Am I supposed to say thanks, fucktard?

I'd rather be here, calling you the sociocentric fucktard that you are.