Types of Connectors for Audio Cables

Video Transcript

"Hi! My name is Kip and I am here on behalf of Expert Village. In this clip we are going to look at the various types of connectors that you will be running into when you are working on your own audio cables or building your own audio cables. Here are several different types of connectors that you will likely run into and there are quite a few more than just this but this will just give you an idea of what we are looking at. Here are three different types of quarter inch connectors that you might run into. This one is the 90 degree quarter inch non-balanced cable and then here is a connector, quarter inch that is typically used for speaker cable. What makes it different from the 90 degree or even a straight quarter inch of this size is that it has a great big hole right here in the back to accept a larger gage cable. I have been able to step up to a 12 gage in here and that is a fairly tight fit but that is what this is for. It is called a jumbo connector. This one is the one that is often times confused. This one is what they call a TSR cable. A lot of folks refer to them as stereo cables because you will usually find the TRS configuration are commonly with headphones and that would mean the sleeve, this portion, would be your ground or common. And you would have a left send and a right send to the headphone to keep your stereo imaging and that is why they decided this is the stereo connector but that is not actually correct. This is what they call a TRS ring C cable and it can be used in stereo applications, yes but is also used to make a balanced cable. If you have audio equipment and it takes quarter inch that says balanced, this can be used as a balanced cable. It doesn't have to be XLR cable, a microphone connector which I will show you in a second, to be a balanced cable. It just needs to have three contact points to be able to be used as a balanced cable. Here are two other types of connectors that you might run into. We have the RCA male and RC female. This is your typical microphone. We've got the male and the female portions of the connectors and each connector on the back has three contact points with little cups and those cups you feel with solder."