Soldering with XLR Microphone Cables

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Jeff Naylor from Mtroniks in Mesa, Arizona for Expert Village. In this next section, we're doing microphone cable. Now the difference between microphone cable and speaker cable is that microphone cable is going to have two conductors compared to an instrument cable's one. You still have your outer shield cable, but now you have two conductors. I'm just going to start fresh here. I'm going to cut it right here. Use my knife to strip that outer layer. Now I'm going to strip this the same way I strip an instrument cable. I'm gently with it because I know there's an outer shield. Pull this off and now we have our braid. Pull all the braid to one side and twist it. The big difference between this and your normal instrument cable is I have two conductors, a red and a blue. I'm going to take out this extra paper material and strip these two conductors. My cables have two conductors because its what's called a balanced cable. The same signal runs down this mic cord 180 degrees out of phase with itself. This allows the cable to cancel any electronic noise that it gets along its path. Where it reassembles its two signals at the end, it wants to put them back in phase with each other. All the noise that it contracted along the run is now 180 degrees out of phase. I've now tinned all three leads. In this next section, we're going to learn how to solder an auxiliary end onto our properly prepped cable."