Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions 3.5 mm jack wiring

Ahh, now we understand. In geek-speak :

- adapter as required to go from digital out on the sound card to standard digital coax

- long cable (how long ?) from adapter to AV receiver, with a couple of wall jacks along the way

Some moderately priced cables use coax for video and wire pairs (or cheaper crappier coax) for audio.

The trick with the 3.5mm plug is that the jack is used for either analog or digital outputs (not both together). Analog needs 2 pins per channel, so two channels per jack needs a 4 pin plug/jack. The card contains some switches so that either the analog OR digital signals go the the jack, and the digital signals have "signal" wired to 2 pins and the "ground" wired to the other 2 pins.

It sounds as if a 2 pin plug can be put into a 4 pin jack and will not short anything out, so in theory you can stick a 2 pin plug into the jack, switch to digital outs, and everything should work.

For people who worry about shorting out their card (like me) the advice is to get a 4-pin 3.5mm to 2xRCA cable so you can put a 4-pin 3.5mm into the card. The only trick then is to make sure you get the and have the right signals going to the right part of an RCA jack -- it seems the card is wired up so that normal adapters work well, but only one of the two RCA jacks will work properly.

Confused ?