SH Spotlight If you have a turntable you need to play your mono records in true MONO. How to do it cheaply..

I sure know what that's like.

 

Okay, I must have bought the wrong cables because when I plug in my Y cables, the music is barely audible. If I unplug either the left or right channel from the female end of the Y cable, everything is suddenly audible in both channels. These are the ones I ordered:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0002J1LE8/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0002J1LF2/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Any clue on which one is messing me up here?

 

Cables appear to be the correct type. Sounds like one of them is defective. Hard to tell which without having other ones to swap out....or check them with an ohm meter.

 

How are you connecting them?

 

Well, poot. I might dust off my meter to check them then.

I have an integrated amp, so my only option is to place the double-Y between my turntable leads and the amp's phono input.

 

Okay, everything checks out with the multimeter. I did noticed something interesting: if I play my iPod through the double-Y cables into the tape-in, everything sounds fine. Could it be that the signal from my turntable is too weak to properly sum the channels before reaching the preamp?

Edit: I just tried it with an external preamp with the Y-cables between the pre and the amp. Still sounds funky. Now I'm totally confused. I would chalk it up to bad cables if it weren't for the fact that they sound perfectly fine with my iPod.

 

You ever talk to yourself and wind up solving your own problem? Turns out my cartridge has been wired incorrectly ever since I installed it. Not too proud of that. Nonetheless, I'm now grooving to some mono Safe as Milk!

 

I'm looking to build a box for myself. Thanks for the schematics. In an attempt to keep things looking a little more uniform with my equipment I would like to use a rotary selector. Does anyone have a suggestion for sources? I have a selection of knobs that would work quite well.

 

This:

http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/stereo-mono-switch.386061/

 

With a slight veering off topic...

This has probably been discussed before (and shot down with malice). Nevertheless, I was thinking... what if the switch was a potentiometer (variable resistor) instead and with it you could adjust the degree of mono-ization? I know that that would be irrelevant for the purpose of blending mono channels on an LP. But, what if you had something that was mixed in "fake" stereo (hard panned left and right) and you wanted to soften the severity of that? This seems like something that receivers might have had on them a long time ago. A"mono blend" control. Just putting it out there. It may, by its very nature, degrade the SQ. I don't know. It certainly is not very purist, per se. But, it sounds like a fun thing to have .

 

I have been playing my older mono only LP's with a Digitrac 280e .3 eliptical with y cables between TT and Cambridge 540p pre they sound fantastic now so if I were to switch over to a say ortophon mono stylus I would get more from the LP's?

 

Can you explain how this would be configured or provide a crude schematic?

 

My simple mono switch will drop vertical pink noise maybe 10 db. I don’t know that anything more than a switch is going to give you much advantage.

 

Not a designer. But I imagine that it would be like the simple mono switchbox. I see a simple mono/stereo switch that could have a 3rd position for engaging a (for lack of a better term...) mono blend pot adjustment. That variable pot would present the same functional extremes as the shorting switch, zero to infinity, except that you could vary the effect of that switch. I don't know what the upper resistance value would be so that it, in effect, it would be of infinite value... just like an open mono/stereo switch. So, the switch positions would be stereo, mono, mono blend.

Or, for simplicity, the pot would just be inline with the mono shorting wire so that it is constantly functional while in mono mode. I liked the first idea just because it seems more prudent to have an absolute mono option that would bypass the variable pot part of the circuit (like the tone defeat concept).

Thanks for asking. It could very well be that someone that knows about this stuff could just interject with "not a good idea because it will..." and that would be that.

 

Don't know what pan pots do.

The reason for all this is for fun. Certainly it is not for the mono LP/stereo cartridge issue. I thought that it would be fun to use a mono/stereo switch in a way that would be adjustable instead of on/off. For one thing, I thought that it would be fun to see how hard panned stereo channels sounded if partially "mono'd" and made less severe. I also was thinking about those tracks that are mixed with totally out of phase L,R content like Waterloo Sunset and Creeque Alley (there must be others). I was wondering what value of pot to spec. The max resistance that would have to be be essentially equal to an OPEN set of contacts would not be so high a value that the effectiveness of the pot's mechanical range would be compressed into uselessness (e.g.: 0-100kOhm vs 0-2MegOhm).

 

Would the pot replace the switch and go across the L and R jacks? I can't comprehend what effect it would have...

 

I'm guessing it wouldn't work.

 

If I can use a switch to make it mono, why not adjust the mechanism to achieve degrees of that L+R blending? When I have time, I will find out and report back. Maybe it won't work, maybe it will. First I have to re-discover my work bench and soldering iron.

 

This is the one I use. Works great!

 

Questions like this, I think, come from the fact that most music listening these days seems to be done with headphones, ear buds, earphones, etc. Ipods and personal listening devices have made music listening more of a private thing, rather than something to be shared over speakers.

So you've got all of these typically '60s songs with wide stereo that, while great music, becomes uncomfortable to listeners with headphones. So these people would want to retain the stereo of a record but reign in the wideness. And you're right - a little line mixer will do the trick. I used to do it all the time in the old days, playing with the positioning of the stereo soundstage by assigning each channel its own volume pot with its own left-right pot.

Computer software can also be called upon these days to accomplish the trick of narrowing a wide stereo field.

Harry

 

Just eBay-ed all parts for $14.00..now to order the damn mono box ...work -in-progress.

 

I have a spare mono switch box - made by a fellow SHForum member, works perfectly - because I bought a new amp with mono switch. If you're in Europe (things with wires and switches etc can't easily be shipped across the Atlantic these days) and interested, send me a PM.

 

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