The Ultimate Audio Converter

Step 7 Wire it up

Place your board face down on a piece of felt or an unloved t-shirt.

Wire it up using the following schematic.

Unlike me, be careful to pay attention while you do it so that you don't wire everything wrong and realize halfway that you have to redo all your work.

One you are done soldering, you are ready to start converting.

Comments

[deafmonkey]

4.7k in line on every out screw terminals are very good for this as you can
feed a thin copper wire across the terminal to form a bridge to tie in your resistors assuming you are staying passive

[mattthegamer463]

Does your board convert from stereo to mono? I've been trying to find a way to do this. Apparently it isn't as easy as putting the L and R channels together, you need to actually combine them with a mixer chip or something, or else you can burn out your amplifier. Did you do this and if so, how?

[dragonfly_blue]

Yes, does it do anything really or is it just a theatrical guise? Not that there is anything wrong with that! tro lo lo!

[woodswalker77]

The quick and dirty way to go from stereo to mono is to use a 4.7K build out resistor on the hot of each outputs before tying them together. I've done this hudreds of times with no ill effects.

[randofo]

I just wired the two channels together. I'm only ever going to really use this to listen to audio playback on my cheap ol' headphones. I can't stand hearing something in one ear.

[Sound Guy Andy]

Wiring two sources together to mono without any summing circuitry is very bad to the signal and both source and receiving devices. By wiring directly, you're wiring two low impedance outputs together to a single high impedance input, and the outputs try to drive each other, which can be VERY bad depending on the device. At a minimum, it's doing nasty things to your audio signal.

The circuitry need not be complex, an appropriately rated resistor (470-600 R or so works nicely) ) in line with each channel before they're tied together is all you really need (if you want to get fancy, a 10k shunt from the summed point to signal ground is nice, but not strictly necessary).

See this article for a more detailed explanation and example circuits:
http://www.rane.com/note109.html

[3BlindMice]

Would be nice to also have RCA line level jacks. I find myself spending quite a bit of time to hunt down my RCA to 1/8" TRS line adaptor when I need to supply mp3 tracks through a mixer "tape in" or 1/4 adaptors for two channels if there is no "tape in". Not the best way to attach one to a mixer, but quick for no more times than I have to do it.