Had the wireless industry decided to license the bands with the FCC, the cost of the devices would have been much higher. Licensing and frequency coordination is expensive and difficult. So, instead of being able to buy a wireless microphone system for as little as $100-$200, the low-end systems would have started at probably $500. The $400 systems would have been $1000. The quality would have been the same – the only difference would have been a little better protection against interference, and the FCC wouldn’t have as easily been able to take back the frequency band for other uses. Either way, it costs the consumer.

The 700MHz band, by the way, is to be used for a nationally-coordinated communications system for first-responders – police, fire, and EMS. When major disasters strike the US, teams from across the country are dispatched to render aid. Cases in point would be major hurricanes, major forest or brush fires, earthquakes, and so on. Unfortunately, all of the communications of these emergency workers are tied to their home base and the particular system installed by their local jurisdiction. Basically, they are unable to communicate with the other responders. The new system deployed in the 700MHz band will allow everyone to be on the same page, communications-wise.

Excuse me, but how is rendering thousands of dollars of my stage gear worthless “protecting consumers”? This statement makes absolutely no sense. I have perfectly good working equipment only a couple years old that rebates will net literally pennies on the dollar. Mr. Feld, the consumer has been attacked, not protected.

Professor Frank, thank you for the warning.

So now you know my setup my questions are

A) is this a harmful signal flow and is this possible on my mixer.

B)what cables would best link all these together to make sure that they are all coming into my mixer in stereo

C) This might be a stupid question, but if you plug mono 1/4 inch into the appopriate left and right out and ins would this achieve stereo, so in other words can you achieve stereo by using to mono 1/4 cords or would i better off using using stereo 1/4 inch into both left and right outputs of my samplers

Thanks for taking the time do answer my questions, this issue is giving me a headache and i want to make sure im using my setup the best way possible, a little hiss isnt too bad for me , since i make mostly lofi tape music any way

P.S. – I’m a musician who walked into a nice set of speakers that need repaired. Its my first time….and is rather exciting…so far.

Thanks again.

Finally have an Alesis RA-100 power amp for my passive Celestion 5 monitors. Right now, they are just connected with bare wire and that is working fine, however, I would like to have use permanent connectors. The RA-100 also has 1/4″ OUT and the Celestions use binding posts with round, removable heads spaced too far apart for dual banana jacks. I would like to use the 1/4″ OUTS if possible, since the others ones I’m using on the RA-100 are wire push tabs. Any ideas? Thanks, Frank.

That’s a common problem when a cable develops a fault in the cable itself.
There’s no simple way to determine where the fault lies (unless you can go
through the cable flexing and bending it and discovering that you can clear
the fault temporarily by flexing the cable at a certain point).

Otherwise, you’ll need to cut the cable at the halfway point, and test each
half. Assuming that there is only one fault, you’ll wind up with one good
cable and one bad cable, each half the length of the old one. Once you
determine the bad piece of cable, you could go ahead and cut it in half
again and check both of those pieces. Theoretically, you could wind up
with 2 good pieces of cable, one half the length of the original, and
another one that is one-quarter the length of the original. Hopefully you
can use some shorter patch cables.

Frank the Tech Guy

I always make my own instrument cables from Canare GS-6 and Neutrik connectors. I already made few cable sets, and I got a bad one. This one is dull, the high frequency is just lost. I redo the solder and cut the lenght by 5-7cm, but it’s still not working. Is there anyway to know where exactly the bad spot from the cable ? So I can cut it, and use the remaining length.

Thx
Abner

The 1/4″ jack on all mixers is a mono connection. Now, some mixers do have a T/R/S jack, but that’s not for a stereo connection – that’s for a balanced mono connection (where the signal appears between the tip and the ring terminals on the jack, and the sleeve is just used for shielding only). But don’t let that confuse the issue – if you just a Tip/Sleeve plug into that jack, you ground the ring conductor, and your signal is between tip and sleeve – once again, just a mono connection.

To use the output from a sound card on a PC, which as you indicated is a T/R/S stereo connection, you have two choices. You can get a 1/8″ plug to dual RCA plugs (the Y-cable) and then use two single RCA jack to 1/4″ plugs and run each 1/4″ plug into a separate channel of the mixer (let’s say channel 1 and channel 2). If you have a stereo mixer (with L & R separate outputs), you can then pan channel one all the way to the left, and pan channel 2 all the way to the right, adjust the levels of those two channels appropriately, and then you will have the true stereo mix from the PC.

Or, as you say, you can get an adapter that combines the two RCA plugs into one mono 1/4″ plug, and just use one channel. Of course, you have combined the two stereo channels into one channel, and your mixed signal is now just mono. If it’s a mono mixer, this would be all that would be needed, as you can’t get a stereo mix out of the mixer anyway.

The aux send from a mixer is indeed mono. To get a stereo signal to go back to your PC for recording, the best way would be to pan various channels mostly left, mostly right, or dead center for mono, and then go from the left and right main outputs through a stereo Y to 1/8″ plug to the input jack of the PC. By controlling how you set the pan on each channel, you control the stereo mix. It’s best not to pan all the way left or right, or that particular instrument or vocal will only appear exclusively on the one side of your stereo mix. They made recording that way back in the 1960′s when stereo was in its infancy (some Beatles songs were recorded that way), so that if you listen to the left channel you have acapella singing, and the right channel is strictly instrumental (a la Karaoke).

1) Are the line-in jacks on mixers for 1/4″ mono cables. I know that instrument 1/4″ cables go in fine, but I sometimes use these line-in jacks for music from a laptop. So from the laptop the connectors is an 1/8″ stereo, so does the 1/4″ connector need to be mono (with one stripe)? I’m assuming that it does since I notice when a 1/4″ TSR cable (2 stripes) is plugged in, I only get one signal from the stereo signal, usually the music.

2) If this is the case (where the 1/4″ cable needs to be mono and the 1/8″ cable needs to be stereo), then is the best cable to get (for my purposes) is a 1/8″ stereo to an RCA Y-cable and a RCA-cable to 1/4″ mono adapter?

3) For recording, does the Aux send from a mixer output mono? If that’s the case, then am I right in saying that recording with the cable mentioned above is the right cable to use? Because I’ll be outputting to a 1/4″ mono and going into my laptop with my 1/8″ stereo connector. I’m assuming that should be OK, but that’s the assumption that my macbook pro’s recording 1/8″ jack is stereo.

Any comment would be greatly appreciated!!! Thank you!