XLR to Minijack Repair

One other possible source of confusion stems from the fact that there is no standard XLR wiring schema. So next to some units being faulty, you may be looking at wiring discrepancies. There is balanced vs unbalanced. And USA (2 cold, 3 hot) versus European (2 hot, 3 cold)

The standard for XLR wiring is 1 ground, 2 hot, 3 cold. It wouldn't make much difference if 2 and 3 were reversed as long as pin 1 was always ground

Ron(UK)

It certainly would if using two mics close together...;-)

Well yeah, on the other hand, two mikes close together may require the polarity of one to be reversed. But lets not complicate matters

Ron

ke

Any idea on what the impedance of the x-formers would be?

Chris

Usually something like 600 ohms to 50,000.

--

Dave Plowman snipped-for-privacy@davenoise.co.uk London SW To e-mail, change noise into sound.

If nothing better comes up, you could probably get by with a resistor "H" pad attenuator for each channel of your audio. The four 1/4 Watt resistors can be fit into the XLR connector if you build it carefully.

This won't provide ground loop isolation like a transformer, but it will bring your (0 to +8 DB) 600-ohm line-level audio source down to the approximately -15 DB, 50k-ohm home-entertainment audio standard.

It won't help you with your XLR microphone-level audio, unfortunately. That starts out at about -50 to -60 DB at 600 ohms. You'd have to use a mic. to line level amplifier if you went with an attenuator, which is a bit inefficient and can bring up your noise floor. Not to say I haven't done it or that it didn't work pretty well.