[yianni1066]

Hi all,
I'm making an adapter for my balanced cable so I can also use it with unbalanced sources and i am using an existing 3.5mm 3 pole jack which was factory made and I have snipped the other end to attach a socket for the 2.5mm 4 pole jack on my headphone cable.

The 4 wires in the snipped cable are not colour coded so I have set up a temporary way to figure out what each cable does. This has worked fine in the past when I have adapted a cable.

So I have figured out which 2 are the left and which 2 are the right channels, so all good here, but I've run into a problem.

Once figuring out the pairs, the next job is to figure out positive and negative. This is easily done with dynamic headphones. Touch the wires to the poles and listen. Then reverse the wires and listen. You will get sound whichever way you put them, but, the cone will be moving in the opposite direction when you have it the wrong way round and the sound will not be great. Voila!

But, I'm doing this with a pair of Planar magnetic headphones and the sound is great whichever way I attach them. I can't tell!!

So the question is, does it matter on planars? Shall I just wire it up or am I going to cause a problem or damage them even?

I know, I know, use a meter to figure it out... I don't have one.

All and any help is greatly appreciated!

 

[cantsleep]

multimeter is so cheap tho.
and will be in use quite often.

 

[Pars]

Have a Harbor Freight near you? Or most hardware stores should have a cheap multimeter.
For a 3 pole jack, there won't be "pairs"; there will be a left (tip of plug), right (ring of plug) and 2 "grounds" (sleeve of plug). The left wire will become the L+, the right wire the R+. The other 2 it doesn't matter which channel they go to. Use one for the L- and the other for R-.