Soldering XLR Connectors Like A Pro

okay we're ready to do some wiring this is part three of my soldering and studio wiring course part one was on choosing a soldering iron part two was on basic soldering technique and now we're going to start soldering some audio connectors and cables what i have here is mogami microphone cable relatively standard stuff three conductors three conductors are required for balanced audio signals the three conductors are ground hot and cold in this case the outer shield jacket here is the ground the and the shield the red is hot the colored wire is hot and then the clear is cold on some brands of wire the cold signal will be black is pretty common but this is pretty uh basic stuff that you would be using to wire audio it is suitable for either line level or microphone level so in the second video i showed you a couple different types of wire strippers let's strip this wire using the the kind that i like and then i'll show you how you can do it with those and these what you just adjust and just nick into the outer jacket be careful don't go through the inner insulation if you want to be a little safe you can sometimes pull it down a little further from where you cut and pull it off okay not bad so now you see the the shield is around the other two wires and what you want to do is pull that all separate and you want to get all the strands and twist them tightly together make sure you don't leave any loose ones what i'm going to do is cut off about i guess an eighth of an inch of that insulation and make the other one match it as close as possible all right so that's ready for tinning which i'm going to show you in a second but in case you were using this type of stripper the one trick i want to show you is what you need is a single edge razor blade and what you want to do is hold the blade so it doesn't completely protrude between your fingers and then you can just put it down on the outer jacket and put like a little score in the jacket be careful not to cut the insulation on the inner wires peel all that back and then cut it off if you're using this type of stripper in this case the inner wire i believe is 24 gauge so what you would look for if you're using one of these preset type strippers is the number 24. this actually goes to 22 let's hope it's enough yep did a good job again put that on the smallest one there 22 okay now we have both ends stripped all right so the first thing you need to do when you're soldering pretty much any connector is tin the wires make sure those are twisted tight and then you apply heat with the soldering iron and just melt solder into the wire a little harder to do this on camera it seems you don't have to do the entire shield if there's enough to hold it together so you can cut it and match the other wires it should be pretty good so what i like to do after i've tinned the wires is trim them all blunt so they're all the same length it's important that all the wires are the same length if you cut one of them shorter and somebody trips on a mic cable let's say that one wire will take all the strain and most likely break off so you want to make sure all wires are equal length so now it's time to solder the connector now we're going to tin the connector first but the first thing i want to tell you is the two things that you will definitely mess up one of them is you'll forget to put the boot or the shell or the cover on the wire this has to go on first before you solder the connector murphy's law is when you solder a connector and it just looks beautiful you're going to go and admire your work you're going to look down and go oh i forgot to put the boot on the second mistake you're going to make is you're going to wire connectors backwards and that's because the thing is confusing about connectors is whether they're upside down or right side up or whether it's a male or a female connector the pin sequence reverses now in this case there are pin numbers on the connector right now pin two's on my right flip it over pin 2 is on my left rotate it pin 2 is on my right and that's the way i'm going to solder this connector is with the connector upside down so pin twos on the right pin ones on the left so just like we tin the wire we're going to now tin the connector what you want to do is heat the cup up and fill it with some solder don't overfill it it's better to slightly under fill it make sure it flows nice because i'm right-handed what i'm going to do is i always solder connectors left to right and that keeps me from having to cross over while i'm soldering and possibly burn or melt something all right let's heat the connector insert the tin wire warm it up let it flow done okay the center pin is pin three pin three is low so in this case that's the clear wire once again bend it so it's ready to go right into position heat the xlr insert the wire that's pin 2 on the right hit the xlr insert it okay straighten it out it's still a little hot not bad i've seen better i've seen worse there should be no bare wires exposed so okay now i'm going to show you a slightly more pro approach to wiring xlrs this is mogami multi-pair microphone cable it can be used for line level also and by pairs what it means is each pair is a different audio channel so this is eight pair cable in this one jacket is eight channels of audio so take your razor blade again recess the blade tip between your fingers and then cut down the outer jacket all right that splits open nicely then cut back here the excess remove this all right so in this case i'm gonna now remove this nylon string which is here to strengthen the cable and keep it from getting damaged when you pull on it i want a pain in the neck i'm not going to want this raw end of the cable here so what i'm going to do is i'm going to add a small piece of shrink to heat shrink tubing that when i'm done we'll completely smooth that over let me get this there slide the heat shrink over and when i'm finished i'm going to heat this and it will tighten up on that but for now i'm just going to leave it down on the cable i'm going to choose a line here's channel 8 all right so let's wire channel 8. similar procedure strip the outside jacket but in this wire you'll see that there is copper shield like the other wire but there's also a bare wire inside and that's called a drain wire so what i want to do for this connector is i want to remove the copper shield and only leave the drain wire so i'm going to twist this shield and then i'm going to actually remove it now i'm left with the two insulated wires the gray wire is channel 8 hot the clear wires channel 8 cold and this bare drain wire make sure you can see that i don't want that drain wire bare so i'm going to take some of this plastic teflon tubing and i'm going to cut it so that it covers the drain wire i do this before i tin the water because it's just easier to get the teflon tubing on okay now once again we're going to have this raw end here so i'm going to grab some smaller heat shrink tubing about this size and i'm going to cut small piece off and again slide it over the wire i'm not going to heat that yet i'm going to heat that at the very end so now i need to strip the hot and the cold just like the other wire tin it and this wire is really a lot nicer to work with than that first wire that i showed you much easier to do a neat connector all right so i got that tin now before i forget i'm going to put the boot on and put that piece of shrink back in so now it's the same as soldering any other xlr connector this xlr is already tinned i don't tie the ground lug with pin one on an xlr connector and i'll explain that in more detail when i do my grounding video now we need to tighten up the shrink i've got a heat gun and i'm going to heat the shrink around that jacket [Applause] as you can see this connector is much tighter and much cleaner than the other one that we did with the regular mic cable so we assemble the connector and what i'm going to do is i'm going to tighten up the shrink on this section here [Applause] [Applause] okay so the last thing i'm going to do is label this cable and i really like this dymo 4200 i've had it a couple years and one of the best things about it is you can buy aftermarket labels that are cheap all right so let's there so that's what i would call a bit more of a professional job that's it for this week's episode if you enjoyed this please click subscribe and the notification bell i also have a link below to a patreon account and you can buy any of these tools you see in this video from links below

Channel: Biased Audio

Views: 86,171

Keywords: XLR, XLR Connector, Wiring a XLR, how to solder a XLR, How to Solder a mic cable, How to solder a microphone cable

Id: itY6zUG9rSg

Length: 16min 47sec (1007 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2020