Cable Building

Ah good point thanks. I haven't opened up the cable to see but that makes sense. Cheers.

 

Excellent find. Might be cheaper directly from Senn. Part number 092885

 

Thanks!

The heat shrink on the individual XLR pins isn't nearly as fiddly as you'd think. If you cut the right lengths it'll slide up and down the wires, even with them still twisted, pretty easily, and if you use 3:1 shrink, it'll slide over the pins easily too. You just have to make sure to pull back the paracord a couple of inches and keep the heat shrink away from the wires as you solder them or it'll shrink in place.

If I slide my fingers along the cables to the ear-cups on this one you can hear it a little, but the paracord helps a bit. Twisting or braiding wires is always going to make them more microphonic as it stiffens the structure. It'd be quieter if you just ran the wires untwisted inside the paracord.

Now, in use, I don't hear it as I move around and the cable brushes against my shirt etc. It's only audible if I'm fiddling with the upper parts of the cable itself.

It's not nearly as microphonic as the bare twisted pairs that came on my HE-500!

 

After being cable-curious for years, I've finally just made up my first couple. Now listening to my own (AES) cable for the first time...and it sounds fine. Yay

Nothing fancy, but it's a start. Don't look at the heat-shrink on the RCA cable too closely! Actually it turns out the green cable is a bit too thick for the Neutrik RCAs so that was a bit of a struggle. The XLR took no time at all, much easier.

 

Ah, nice! I've had bad experiences with cables with fabric all the way up to the headphones, on a few occasions. Clearly your selection of paracord cover was on-point.

For what it's worth, later HiFiMAN cables are pretty bad, too- though they're fabric covered all the way, but are stiff, awkward and fairly noisy, too. I do wonder what they're on, sometimes.

 

I'm re-terminating an Audeze cable from SE to 4 pin XLR balanced (first project).
I'm not really sure I understand how the 4 pin mini-xlr outs wire up. I saw this diagram:



which I think means treat the 1&4 pair as + and the 2&3 pair as minus for each side,
effectively turning the 4 outs per connector into 2. Is this right? Is no ground
required for a balanced Audeze balanced cable?
@PoochZag, how did you wire the pins
for your ZMF balanced cable?

Thanks

 

There are only two connections for each ear-cup/driver: "+" and "-" ... there's no "ground", as such, with a balanced connection.

From memory (it's been a while) you can just use pin 1 for + and pin 3 for - for each channel, and not worry about shorting the 1-4 and 2-3 connection (I think they're bound that way in the headphone itself anyway).

Poking a multi-meter into the headphone XLRs will tell you for sure.

 

Correct, but by using all four pins you potentially get a firmer connection. Also, if a solder joint isn't perfect or a pin fails, you have a back up. I found soldering the cross between the pins a huge pain the ass. Be careful, it's easy to melt away a pin.

 

Cut, bend, and twist a short jumper with the main incoming line, tin everything, and then its pretty easy to make the cross-connections/shorts.

Small gauge solid-core works well for such jumpers.

 

I don't really understand what the jumpers are for. The cable I'm re-terminating is
8 strands and all 8 are wired to pins. Wouldn't it be the same to connect the pairs
that would be shorted to the same XLR pin at the other end of the cable, shorting
them there?

 

if you wire 2 to each pin, that would work the same. The theory for using all four pins is it man a better connection and if a pin fails, you have backup. You don't have to cross connect, but it's a good idea. You don't need to cross connect if you put a wire or two to each pin.

 

While I'm way behind on what I'd said I'd build/post, in particular I've not gotten to doing the actively biased dielectric cable yet (this weekend, I expect), I did get a break this evening to build a balanced braided cable for the LCD-2.2c I run in the office.

Apparently, I need to drink less while building these and pay more attention to the lengths of heat shrink ...



Oddly enough the easiest part of this is doing the 4-way braid into the splitter, and that was the part I was most anticipating being a pain.

By far the hardest part of this was, like the last cable I posted, getting the wiring through the top holes in the Eidolic splitter. I'll have to look for something else there. I think these work well for braids/twists that have no external sheathing on them beyond the raw insulation, as one might build for an IEM, but for stuff using paracord it's probably easier to use a speaker-cable splitter.

Incidentally, the phase-reversal cable I mentioned in the previous post is described/built in this thread.

 

That's an easy fix (he says due to needing to 'fix' similar situations).

Use a set of precision dykes and cut away the 'extra' black heat shrink.
This will work as long as you didn't use the self sealing marine grade hot goo in the middle type of heat shrink.
And of course the heat gun on HI so that goo is thoroughly melted into the very fibers of the outer jacket…

Because if you did, well you have 2 choices right about now…

Leave it and sigh every time you notice,
or,
Cut it all off and start over.
Been there done that and swore that it was the LAST time I'd forget that one little detail, again.

JJ
ps besides that red heat shrink needs to be trimmed jest a touch…

 

Dang, I thought my color scheme was original!

 

I'm far too aesthetically sensitive to leave it as it is ... so I'll just order some prettier mini-XLR connectors (just used what I had on hand) and redo the ends of the thing.

In the mean time I'm going to try and finish up the actively biased dielectric cable, though first I need to find some splitters that are a bit easier to get the wire through.

Well, it's still different to mine ... I used black and "black-widow", rather than black and red. It broke the colors up a bit more and gave an overall darker look. I like both though. I'll likely do a four-way purple/red/black/grey braid just to see how that works out using solids next.

 

I have some larger Ysplits from when I was actively making cables. Some silver colored aluminum and some black Viablue. If you are interested in buying a couple (for cheap), PM me.
Silver one on an 8 wire sleeved cable:

Viablue next to one for size comparison:

 

how do you get those to stay? I had a cable with teh viablue y-split and the set screw was definitely not enough to hold the sleeves cables in there, it would always slide around

 

Heat shrink some cotton filler.

 

Or use multiple layers of heat shrink and stagger their lengths.

JJ

 

While waiting for a couple of parts to come in for the actively-biased dielectric cable, I put together a "for pretties" AES/EBU XLR 110 ohm digital cable.

This was done mostly to provide as close to a like-for-like AES/EBU connection from my Aries as that which I built to run with my RedNet 3 (same connectors, cable, shield, sheathing, just with a different end on the side of the RedNet 3 since it's not an XLR output for it's AES/EBU interface.



And yes, I really like the Neutrik connectors ... (the Eidolic's and Switchcraft ones are, perhaps, a bit prettier, but they are harder to work with and the Switchcraft in particular is a pain in the arse to assemble properly once it's wired).

Less than $15 in parts for this cable.