DIY-Central.com - Go Create something! - PCB Design, Electronics

Looking to save some money? Create your own cables! By spending a few dollars on jacks, shielded cables, solder and soldering iron, you can save a ton of money in cables.

For more money saving tips for your home studio, like building your own Neve preamps, SSL compressors, Yamaha "old-school" type preamps, MIDI controllers, check out my other projects.

Back to building your own cable...It's easy. Here are some step by step photos. 

At the bottom of this article, is a wiring guide for XLR to XLR, XLR to TRS, XLR to TS, and whatever combination you can think of.

On this guide, I'm wiring up an XLR cable.  First, we disassemble the cable by unscrewing the lock screw. Pull out the rubber plug (black thingy) and then you'll be able to push out the 3-pin connection assembly.




Since an XLR cable is a balanced cabel, we need a 3-wire cable. Also, make sure it is shielded to provide RF interference protection. 




Now, let's take a look at the XLR jack itself.  It's got 3 pins. Pin 1, 3 and 3. 

The convention is Pin 1 is the GROUND.
Pin 2 is the HOT (+) wire.
and Pin 3 is the COLD (-) wire.

Note: The COLD wire (-) is not the same as the GROUND wire. Don't short these two wires together!

Here's a closeup of the 3-pin assembly and you can see it's labeled for us. Great!  For this, I'm going to make my RED wire my HOT (+) wire and the WHITE wire as my COLD (-) wire.  (If you're wiring a headphone, the RED wire is usually designed for the RIGHT channel, and the WHITE wire for the LEFT channel)



Strip off a few millimeters of insulator, coat it with solder and solder it to the XLR jack terminals.



When you're done soldering the 3 wires, crimp the jack around the cable. This will provide support to the cable... i.e. when you yank off the jack, your wires wouldn't disconnect from your solder points.



Here, you can see the metal teeth crimped around the cable's jacket. Use a long-nose pliers to crimp it close. But don't crimp it too much that you mess up the cable.

Do the same procedure for the other end of the cable. This time using a Female XLR jack.  And here's our finished XLR cable.



If you need to DIY a different kind of cable, say a TRS jack or RCA, use the table below as a guide. This guide has been provided by Rane in their Technical Library section. Visit Rane website.

Credits: Rane

Visi the RANE website for more information about grounding, shielding, ground loops, etc.