Don't appologize for the long explanation, it was as entertaining as you thought it would be! It happens to all of us at one point: thinking something is broken when the batteries where inserted wrong (not me), changing the connectors at one end of a cable you did not build yourself and discovering that the "off" in the resulting sound is that the original builder did not have the same reference as you for red and black (me, wasting a good 4-5 hours of troubleshooting).
They're all pretty after the fact!
