well hey guys my name is Zahkman I'm also known as Isaac Bueckert and I live
my life as a church audio tech and I wanted to sorta share that with you
guys and part of that is doing things like soldering cables and using products
I'm gonna do reviews as well but today I want to show you how to solder a TRS
cable using a neutrik connector and you know I love soldering actually find it
one of the fun things in my job I love to have a day where I can just solder
cables and do that kind of work it feels almost relaxing or even almost
meditative and so maybe you will begin to enjoy that as well it's also very
handy you can make your own connections you can do installations in a much more
efficient way you can make adapters there's quite a few benefits to being
able to slaughter cable so it's good skill for you to have mm-hmm and you
know I make my videos about the church audio life when I have a chance to
because it's a very busy life and if you are Church audio tech do any sort of
think you'll you'll understand that and so I also do this when I have jobs
already to do so I have to solder this rack mounting stake and it get all
connections to it and we've already ran cables through the room so I just want
to terminate them now so that's what I'm going to do in this video so first I
want to talk through the different things you will need they are all shown
here first of all you need a decent soldering iron with a fairly narrow tip
you'll need rosin core solder some kind of clamp is always good needle nose
pliers are always handy some kind of small cutters jacket removers are very
handy and wire strippers are essential and then of course your Neutrik
connector okay so we want to do a TRS cable because that's how I'm going to
put the outputs of this board into the speakers that are up in the rafters and
so obvious thing is to start by getting your connector ready this is actually a
connector we've already had from a previous projects that's why it's not in
a package but I'll just take this apart and this is a new trick
TRS connection so the TRS means tip ring in sleeve and what that means is
actually a balanced cable that means it's going
to be able to reject interference and hum those kinds of things and you're
gonna be able to be sent a lot further distance without getting those kind of
sounds into your ear sound so the main parts that are part of that there is the
boot strain relief connector and basically metal sleeve or jacket in my
shoes I'm not sure they call this but the outside so I also have my cable
ready this is the cable that I need to attach to this mixer it's the first
thing you want to do is just put your boot over top of that and then you want
to put your strain relief the reason why you want to do this first is that
there's no way to get that on once it's soldered so if you forget to do this
before you start your soldering you're gonna be a lot of trouble leading up to
unsolder the whole thing put it on and then redo it again and I think anybody
who's done soldering has probably done that at least three or four hundred
times so best I learned this early and I don't have to make that mistake this
could be put on after the fact there's a split in it but I put it on now so I
don't forget to this in place you know next thing I do is I put the connector
into the clamp just to get that ready to go
so in my church we always use Neutrik connectors because they are just really
solidly made they make the whole process simpler so you can solder faster which
makes your time more efficient and they seem to last for years and years and
years so they're worth the investment they can be bought on Amazon or B and H
photo or on AV shop CA if you're in Canada and so I'd say they're well worth
getting okay so now that we got the boot on strain relief on what I want to do is
prepare the cable so I'm going to use this jacket stripper that we have and
what I want to do is strip back a butt of some of the people say would be a
your thumbnail length of cable of jacket off of the wire maybe tiny bit more
and this is a simple device you just literally pinch around it let it have
its own tightness to do one spin around undo it and pull the jacket off it's
really beautiful and easy way to get the jacket off and we sure don't spin around
too often or have it too tight otherwise should we cut into the actual wires once
I have this open I get rid of this little bit of twine that's in there for
them when a manufacturer then I want to get these all separated out
there's a bit of foil around the two connectors let's just get rid of that
there we go
now in this cabling is always gonna be three wires and that's what actually
makes these a balanced cable like I mentioned earlier and while will reduce
interference or hum those kinds of things over long distances and that
means they're gonna have a ground a positive and a negative
now usually would go on two pins one two and three and to connect to a TRS cable
you need to cut these two very specific lengths so there's a picture from
Neutrik the exact lengths sometimes gonna need to go quite that far and me
hard to actually measure that exactly what I like to do is to line it up on
the jack and considering that my black cable is going to be my longest I really
that probably made these longer than any - so I'm going to trim this one back
both there the white one and it's doing this kind of visually considering how
much is going to be going to inside of the connector so much about that's there
that's about
what there that's good yep tiny bit more for this one and then the shield okay
a little bit less
okay so the once those are the right length then you want to strip back the
rubber on there so we have a wire stripper for that this is I know is 20
gauge cable so you want to use the 20 gauge hole in this thing you want to
strip back just enough to fit into the cups and no more because you want the
rubber to go right up into that points you don't have exposed wire that's about
the right amount and when you're using the stripper make sure that you get the
other ones out of the way otherwise you might damage them there we go once these
are stripped you want to tin them and tinning is simply having solder be
absorbed into the different threads of the wire and what you basically do is
need to heat up your soldering irons just turned on and then hold disorder
against the wire and have this the Sauter come through it so I'll show you
how that works so this could be put back into your clamp one thing to note is
that heat travels through the solder and so one thing that's always good to do is
just dab a little bit of solder on to there before you even start
hold the soldering gun underneath the wire you want to tin and then how push
the solder on and it goes sucks right in hopefully you can see that it goes right
into the wire I'll do that for all three
this gets it ready to solder and it also holds all the strands together and you
don't want too big of a gloop on there just enough to kind of cover them well
at this point too you would tin the connector and basically this means is
filling up the cups that are on there and one thing I was taught I think it's
the right method and I believe you get a better slaughter is called you want a
hot soldering on a cold solder I've looked at other videos
online and they just basically almost like melt disorder by just kind of
dripping it into the cups but what works a lot better is if you actually I can
have solder on your the tip of your soldering iron hold it underneath the
cup and then have the the cup get hot enough to melt the solder that way
they're at the same temperature and they bond together much better and much
better and longer lasting solder so these already are tinned but also a bit
more just so you can see an example of them so I was gonna do this one for the
ground and hold this on the bottom of it and then I'm gonna put the solder in and
you see how it melts on that adds add solder to it and that is gonna have a
really nice sauger the top one's a little harder to get to solder got
underneath in this case I'll do more just to this side but again I'm not
touching this or indirectly to the iron but to the the metal there you go and
then simply what you need to do is connect the wires to the connector and
we tear ice is a bit more tricky than other cables I've just found in my
experience that I like to put in the hot cable first and on a TRS this should be
noted that the tip is is always positive which is actually in the middle the ring
is always negative which is usually on the top and the ground is on the bottom
so I can just tell by this my I've actually left a little bit too much
exposed so I'm gonna trim just a little bit off the end on the number two here
and then what I want to do is actually I I just find it easier to start actually
with the tip number two otherwise they get in each other's way too much and so
I'll do that one first
then I used to do the ground next
you want to make sure you let that hold that in place until the solder totally
cools and then what's important is for this last one make sure that you have
the it bent right before you even start otherwise we can have nothing but
trouble here and this case is hard to get hard to touch anything so I touch
more to the side so that the metal heats up
good so I still want to avoid that cold solder but I knew something's had to tap
it just on the end just doing sure everything sits in place nicely so
that's effectively soldered now basically take this out of the clamp
take the strain relief and it actually is a very natural way that it fits in
you see it kind of slots over that space
take the metal sleeve jacket whatever put it through there put the boot on the
end and screw it together so that screws on good and tight you get a nice good
connection there everything is good and solid and that is ready to go if you had
a single cable wasn't part of this kind of installation then you would now do
the other end of the exact same procedure and this cable would be would
be done so hope that's helped you hope that I'll help you do things in the
future here want to solder a TRS cable together if you liked this video please
press the like button or subscribe I'm gonna have more videos like this also
gonna have videos where like real life reviews of products we've actually
tested out and used in in the church and I will share the good bad ugly about
those products and hopefully they'll help you when you're purchasing
decisions alright well thank you for watching and God bless