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Better Phone Jacks - more solid connection - fewer problems.


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I have been plagued with 1/4" phone jack/plug connection problems for about as long as I've been a musician. And that is a looooooooooong time.

 

You know the kind, one cable moves another, or you brush up against a cable, or you breathe on it (exaggeration) and the jack/plug connection gets compromised with the resulting pop, crackle, and/or drop out. Drives me crazy some times.

 

About a month ago, I bought a new, different design. It clamps the tip and ring parts of the connection with two opposing flanges. I took the time to install 4 of them today on the most troublesome connection problem I have, and I can almost jump rope with the cable with no problems. These work.

 

Now I don't really buy into the hype about better tone because I figure the electricity either gets through or not. With the tiny size of the center conductor of most cables, it doesn't need any more than that much contact. But if you have connection problems, these might just do the trick for you.

 

I just bought a half dozen more.

 

Note, I have no association with this company at all other than the fact that I'm a customer.

 

If interested, you can check them out here:

 

https://puretonetechnologies.com/

 

Insights and incites by Notes

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I never had that problem until we started getting equipment and cables with slightly undersized imported 1/4" connectors. Both plugs and jacks were undersized so an imported plug would fit loosely in an American (Switchcraft was where it was at in those days) jack, and an American plug was difficult to insert into an imported jack. This is pretty well sorted out today, but if you have a $2 guitar cable from the 1970-80s, I understand your chronic pain.

 

The Pure Tone jacks seem to be a pretty good idea, particularly for instruments, where they get a lot more plugging and unplugging than gear with mostly fixed connections.

 

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I've even had trouble with Switchcraft jacks and plugs. Switchcraft has always been my first choice. And I still repair cables. I know it's time consuming, but it seems a waste to throw something good into the landfill. We have an overabundance of trash and I like to do what I can to minimize what I toss out.

 

Plus I've been gigging for a living since 1964, when there were no Asian imports, and the problem, while not as numerous as it is today has always been around.

 

Perhaps it's the corrosive climate I live in (coastal Florida). I also keep DeOxit and DeOxit Gold always on hand. DeOxit (red) cleans connections well and the DeOxit Gold inhibits corrosion.

 

Perhaps it's because I make a living doing one-nighters so the endless plugging and unplugging weakens the tension on the jacks.

 

I think if you don't have these kind of connection problems, these jacks would be a waste. On the other hand, if you do have connection problems, these are well worth the money.

 

Insights and incites by Notes

 

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Those look pretty cool, Notes.

 

I don't have that many problems with 1/4" jacks, other than a few cheap mixers I've had where the jack was soldered directly to a printed circuit board.

 

I do seriously wish they'd start using XLR jacks on guitars though. It could provide phantom power to preamps (goodbye batteries!, goodbye direct boxes).

There is an impedance issue though, since XLR are usually 600 Ohm lines, and (passive pickup) guitar output impedance is several thousand Ohms. They can squeeze transformers into mics, so it's do-able.

 

And, of course, everyone would need to buy reverse direct boxes to be able to feed into pedal boards & instrument amps.

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I do seriously wish they'd start using XLR jacks on guitars though. It could provide phantom power to preamps (goodbye batteries!, goodbye direct boxes).

There is an impedance issue though, since XLR are usually 600 Ohm lines, and (passive pickup) guitar output impedance is several thousand Ohms. They can squeeze transformers into mics, so it's do-able.

 

Gibson made the Les Paul Recording model that used an XLR, but at least one variant was was kind of bogus. Initially I thought that they made low impedance pickups for that guitar (Chet Atkins had low impedance pickups for some of his guitars), but at least one schematic I've seen of that model showed a transformer inside the guitar - essentially a DI. They also supplied an in-line low-to-high impedance transformer with a female XLR on one end and a 1/4" unbalanced plug on the other (hi-Z) end to plug into a standard guitar amplifier.

 

I don't think anyone thought about an internal preamp at the time, but it certainly would be possible.

 

There's nothing about XLR connections that make them 600 ohms. The source sees whatever the impedance on the destination end is. True, you wouldn't want to connect a high impedance pickup to a mic preamp input that typically has an impedance of 1500 to 2500 ohms, but the transformer in the Les Paul Recording (or an active preamp in your dream guitar) would take care of that.

 

 

 

 

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Next what they need is a locking MIDI jack/plug. The engineers that designed MIDI did a great job with the specs, and they used an off-the-shelf connector that worked fine for transferring the signal, but I can tell those engineers were never in a road band ;)

 

I play wind synth, percussion synth, and my partner plays a tactile MIDI controller. We have 4 synth modules in a road rack. Sooner or later a 5 Pin DIN MIDI cable will fall out, usually when we set up in a place that makes it difficult to remove the back cover of the rack case and see which one fell out.

 

On the bottom front of the rack I have one rack space with jacks for our mics, Leilani's guitar, my guitar, (guitars via amp-sim/fx boxes) my wind synth, her tactile controller, pedal for the PA FX off/on, monitor outs, main speakers out, and power.

 

This allows me to plug everything in the front, and that makes setup and teardown easier. Everything but the actual instruments and the speakers is in one case. Since I do one-nighers for a living, that's important to me.

 

But with so many wires close to each other, and the floor, there is always a chance of when one may get tugged, it may move another. As soon as I replace the phone jacks, that problem will be solved. It's slow season so sooner than we want well get enough downtime for me to spend a day or two on it.

 

Notes

 

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I agree on the midi jacks. Oddly' date=' the 13 pin jacks used on roland guitar midi does lock. It can't be a huge impossible mechanical engineering task to make a compatible 5 pin version... can it?[/quote']

 

I always wanted a locking Firewire connector. Neutrik made a Firewire socket in a chassis mount XLR shell (like their Ethernet connectors) but they never made a plug tto mate with it. Funny, but whenever I asked someone when it was coming, they either didn't know about the socket at all, or they didn't know that they didn't sell its mate.

 

MIDI only needs three wires, so if you wanted to do the metalwork you could change out the 5-pin DIN sockets with XLRs. Many years back, a co-worker of mine, an early audiophile of the best kind, swapped out all the RCA jacks in his home stereo system with BNCs and made cables. No more loose pin problems!

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