Microphone extension cable

[aetmos]

Hi All,

I just bought a little T-shaped stereo electret microphone for my NH900. It works fine when plugged directly into the MD, but I'd like to use an extension cable. I have a few 1/8" extension cables laying around, but whenever I try to use one of them with this microphone, I get all kinds of buzzing, and no signal whatsoever from the mic. Is there some special kind of cable that I'm supposed to use for this? Where do I get one?

Thanks,

Tom

Edited December 20, 2006 by aetmos

[King Ghidora]

Most likely the mic isn't getting enough power through the cable extension. The longer the cable the more resistance you'll have plus any connector you have will cause more resistance. If your mic needs every bit of the plug in power your MD provides to work correctly any added resistance will cause the power to drop enough so that your mic won't work correctly.

It could be that you're getting a lot of interference with the extended cable too. 1/8th inch cables are bad to pick up interference from almost any electomagnetic source which shows up as noise. Those cables don't have enough shielding as a general rule to keep this from happening. Things like cell phones and light dimmers can create a lot of EM interference. So can computers. You might solve the problem with a better quality cable. You should be able to test to see if this is the problem by getting away from any possible source of interference and checking whether you still get noise.

[aetmos]

It occurred to me that the problem is that the average 1/8" headphone extension cable has only two wires, even though it uses a TRS connector. To get power to a stereo mic at all, you need that third wire in the cable...

...I found a cable that had all three wires connected, and it fixed the problem.

Edited December 21, 2006 by aetmos