3.5mm To TRS or TS 1/4 inch ???

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
1

3.5mm To TRS or TS 1/4 inch ???

I am taking one of my powered speakers to a small pool party.

My friends want to be able to play their iPods throughout the day.

Each one of my speakers has a 1/4 inch (TS/TRS) input. I only need one speaker at the party.

If I go TS, I know that the 3.5mm to TS adapter will merge the 3.5mm STEREO (Left/Right) signal into a TS cable MONO signal. All should be fine.

But if I have a STEREO 3.5mm to TRS adapter, what happens to the Left/ Right channels?

Will the speaker be looking for a balanced signal path and ignore one of the STEREO channels?

Therefore not getting both Left and Right audio signals to the output audio?

Thanks.

2

What’s the make & model of the speaker? That will be the best way to get a specific answer.

In general, a speaker is not the right place to mix stereo into mono. If you have any kind of mixer with a mono output capability…that would be the way to go.

3

Behringer B215D. Here is the diagram of the I/O panel:

http://www.behringer.com/assets/B208D_B210D_B212D_B215D_fig1_XL.png

4

this is very interesting:

http://www.rane.com/note109.html

5

Looks like the safe answer would be to take both speakers and a Stereo Y Adapter 3.5mm to dual RCA to 1/4 inch TS.

What a pain.

6

EDIT: I mis-understood your intent. So I am getting rid of my own posting of the Rane 109 tech note. The rest still applies.

Get this, or the equivalent. Plug your stereo source into channels 7 & 9, and pan both of those channels hard left. Then use the left output on the master and run that to the speaker.

7

It’s so annoying that the cheapest powered speakers have Stereo RCA inputs:

8

I’ll be doing this for FREE ^

9

My best guess is to say that you’d get your left channel only while the right would be sent to ground but it depends on the internal wiring of the cable, really. I’d say test it beforehand. Worst case is the left & right cancel each other out or seriously degrade the signal. Best case is you get your left channel.

10

Settings → General → Accessibility → Mono Audio → On

Took me 5 seconds to get to it, then run a 3.5mm → 1/4" jack into the speaker. If you use a Y splitter as a passive summing box, you WILL fry your input, as that Rane note says.

11

Thanks for that iPod mono trick. That will work.

12

After some more research, the safest and most effective way, is to first make sure to set the iPod to mono as recommended above.

Then hook up a 3.5mm Stereo-Y adapter to two mono TS 1/4 inch jacks. Only use one of the jacks to the one speaker.

In the future, if you need more SPL, you can just set the iPod back to normal stereo mode and use both TS jacks to connect both speakers.