[viivo]

[...]
Tom

Thank you so much for your time and help. The measurement, unless I misunderstood and took the wrong one, is roughly 90mm. Is there anything I need for this that I could buy from your store, or at least pay shipping?

 

[Paladin79]

I have it covered, I am taking care of this personally and not being a sponsor here, I would probably be breaking rules if I sold this to you. It is just my way of helping out a DIYer. 90 MM sounds much too long. Where your cable actually enters one one side, to the connection on the driver is all you need on each side. You will have a jack on each side, and two wires going from each jack to the lugs on the driver. In the photo I am going to the center of the driver and it is only 30 mm or less. We do not even have to go that far. There will be no wires going from one driver over to the other driver, each side will have two wires going right to the jack. Make sense now? I can tin an extra amount and you can cut the wire shorter if need be, or if you leave it, I will include some clear heatshrink tubing to insulate the tinned portion. Making it a bit longer will probably make it easier to work with but I bet 40 mm or so would be more than enough. I will also mark the wires red and black so you know which is which. The jack will be pre-wired so all you have to do is attach two wires to each driver, install the jacks, then build your headphone cable. I will think about this some but in the event I am confusing you, I may send along a couple properly wired 3.5 mm connectors so there is no doubt how things go together.

 

[Paladin79]

See if this helps, on each cup you will have a 3.5 mm jack (female), and two wires going to the outside solder lugs on each driver. That is all you need. When you have a single entry system, you have to run two wires from one side to the other through the headphone band. On a dual entry system, each circuit is self contained, one for left cup one for right cup.

 

[Sheep1234]

I want to solder a cable to a 3.5 mm Viablue plug and have 4 wires.
The wires were origianlly soldered to a 2.5 mm balanced plug. It's for a IEM that have 2 pin connectors.

Where do I solder the wires to and does it matter which one goes to which part of the plug?
Here a picture

 

[Paladin79]

I want to solder a cable to a 3.5 mm Viablue plug and have 4 wires.
The wires were origianlly soldered to a 2.5 mm balanced plug. It's for a IEM that have 2 pin connectors.

Where do I solder the wires to and does it matter which one goes to which part of the plug?
Here a picture

two wires to sleeve, both of them should be ground wires. one wire to tip, one wire to ring. I would place the wires through the small holes as much as possible, either that or you are soldering to the side of the two cylinders, and some extra solder flux helps. The tip portion looks flat so I would loop a wire around it, then solder it. Sleeve has a hole, you might get one wire through it and then join the second ground wire to the first and solder.

Tip is left channel, ring is right channel, sleeve is ground. On the actual connector tip, it goes tip, ring sleeve from top to bottom.

If you reverse the two wires going to the tip and ring you will have the right channel on the left and left channel on the right but it will not cause any damage. This is where an ohmmeter can come in handy, it can tell you all connections and make sure you have proper continuity from one connector to two others.

 

[Allanmarcus]

I want to solder a cable to a 3.5 mm Viablue plug and have 4 wires.
The wires were origianlly soldered to a 2.5 mm balanced plug. It's for a IEM that have 2 pin connectors.

Where do I solder the wires to and does it matter which one goes to which part of the plug?
Here a picture

Paladin covered most of I would have said, so I will just add a few words of wisdom.

1) TRS = Tip, Ring, Sleeve. The easy way to remember what these are is that the sleeve is alway the common (or ground) and Ring = Right (R=R). This only works for TRS plugs.
2) Don't solder anything to the cylindrical part of the plug that gets inserted into the jack

The sleeve part that you will connect the two common ground wires to has a hole, which is really nice. Many plugs don't have a hole for the sleeve. The Tip and Ring will be harder. Your best bet is to use a vise or helping hands clips (vice is more better) to hold the plug as you solder. Tin the wires. There are plenty of YouTube videos on tinning, if you don't know how. Add a little tiny solder to the plug's tip connector, then pull back a sec. touch the tip wire to the tip connector, then apply the iron to fuse the wire to the connector. That may only take a second or two. let it cool for 15-30 seconds, then do the same on the ring connector.

You might even want to slide a 1/4" of very thin heat shrink on to the tip wire BEFORE you solder it, then after you solder it, slide the heatshring down and cover the exposed wire and connector. If you are slick, you could do the same wit the ring solder joint too, but obviously you need some thicker heat shrink. That will server as a little extra adhesive and some electrical insolation. The heat shrink is not required; it's only nice. Sort of an example I stole from the interwebs that shows some heatshrink:

I'm not sure how the plug provides strain relief since there is no crimp. If there is no strain relief, you may need to hot glue the wires in place or something. I think it might have a screw that's supposed to lock the wire in. If that is the case, you might want to ticket/protect the wire where the screw's goes with the heat shrink.

Personally, I think you've selected one of the more difficult plugs to solder. It's always easier when you have actual solder lugs. Be REALLY careful not to overhear that central column, or you will melt it and ruin the plug.

Hope this help.

 

[Paladin79]

I would hope there is some kind of strain relief in the back shell on that connector. I do like the fact that holes were added to the connection points. If indeed there is nothing that clamps down on the jacket and keeps the strain off of the solder joints, Allan's comments about hot glue are certainly valid. Personally I do not use a lot of heat shrink on the inside of the connectors but I have done this type of thing for years and make certain there are no stray strands of wire close to anything they should not touch but it is good advice for those just starting out. The connector I showed in my photo is common for some of the Chinese product that is out there. I bought those without knowing they were not using solder lugs so I never use them. I generally give them away to folks who are learning how to solder for something to practice on, if you can use them, you will not have any issues using a decent connector with proper lugs. Your connector is in between the two versions Sheep, and a slight improvement on what I showed.

A mnemonic device I use with 3.5 mm trs connectors is three R's, red, ring, right.

Red is right channel and historically on most TRS connectors my employees use, with solder lugs, the ring connector is on the right side and we attach a red wire to it to keep everything straight. On many pieces of equipment if red and white RCA connectors are side by side the red is often on the right but not always.

Tomorrow I shall be home installing several pieces of audio equipment in a cabinet so if anyone has any questions about using star quad cable with RCA and XLR connectors, I shall be doing some of that and can post photos. I have already built a long USB 2 A-B so that part of the project is complete.

 

[ostewart]

Now I'm not usually one to ask questions here, but having some trouble twisting these cables together, as the silver cable is much softer than the copper. This means the silver twists around the copper, and the copper stays pretty straight... I'm thinking I may need to twist them tightly then heat them gently to stay in that position.

 

[Paladin79]

You want the twists to be equal, not one around the other. Each wire should be the same length whenever possible. Personally I use heat shrink tubing for some applications to maintain the twists. It is not always easy to do using dissimilar metals and requires more effort.

This article may help...

https://www.belden.com/blog/broadcast/how-starquad-works

 

[ostewart]

You want the twists to be equal, not one around the other. Each wire should be the same length whenever possible. Personally I use heat shrink tubing for some applications to maintain the twists. It is not always easy to do using dissimilar metals and requires more effort.

This article may help...

https://www.belden.com/blog/broadcast/how-starquad-works

Conductors are the same size, but toxic cables updated the jacket material so the silver is the V2 and the copper is still the original. The V2 jacket is more flexible :/ I'll find a way to sort it out

 

[Paladin79]

I figured they were same size conductors. When one wire makes many turns around another that is more stationary, then length gets thrown off and that can have some minor effects as well.


You show an impressive list of audio equipment.

 

[Allanmarcus]

Now I'm not usually one to ask questions here, but having some trouble twisting these cables together, as the silver cable is much softer than the copper. This means the silver twists around the copper, and the copper stays pretty straight... I'm thinking I may need to twist them tightly then heat them gently to stay in that position.

When I did a silver and copper cable, I braided where I could, trying hard to keep the braiding even, and for the twisting after the split, I just wrapped the copper around the silver. I used solid core silver wire, so it was much less flexible than the copper. The red wires are the copper and the with are the silver. look at the wire between he Y split and the connectors..

If you used a vise to hold the wire ends, you might be able to manually twist the wires evenly by hand, or you could try the drill trick to twist them

 

[ostewart]

When I did a silver and copper cable, I braided where I could, trying hard to keep the braiding even, and for the twisting after the split, I just wrapped the copper around the silver. I used solid core silver wire, so it was much less flexible than the copper. The red wires are the copper and the with are the silver. look at the wire between he Y split and the connectors..

If you used a vise to hold the wire ends, you might be able to manually twist the wires evenly by hand, or you could try the drill trick to twist them

Cheers for that, I don't like coating the cable in heatshrink but I might have to in this case. Is there a flexible type of heatshrink, as what I'm used to is pretty stiff once heated and shrunk.

 

[Paladin79]

Single wall is more flexible than double wall but I have not heard of any more flexible than that but it could exist. I do not always use the heatshrink, I also use poly blends, cotton with nylon, and soon cotton.

The red on Allan's twists are obviously around the other wire, it is not the route I would take but probably as good as could be done with those wires since Allan does an excellent job building cables.

 

[Allanmarcus]

Single wall is more flexible than double wall but I have not heard of any more flexible than that but it could exist. I do not always use the heatshrink, I also use poly blends, cotton with nylon, and soon cotton.

The red on Allan's twists are obviously around the other wire, it is not the route I would take but probably as good as could be done with those wires since Allan does an excellent job building cables.

Thanks. I was going for a "candy cane" look.
I highly doubt I could hear the difference if it were twisted "properly".