Stereo to Mono

[Foxinabox10]

This question is for some work I'm doing in the TV studio at my high school.

For intercoms on portable productions (such as taping shows, concerts, graduation, etc.) we don't need the people on the cameras to talk back, so we just run regular headphones from a mic plugged into a headphone amplifier.

Our old headphones were mono, so the whole system was wired for mono. We just bought new headphones and they're stereo. We don't need stereo sound and right now you only get sound from one ear because the system is mono.

My question is: I have plenty of soldering experience, but is it harder than normal to solder a new mono connector on headphones that have a molded connector on them?

[fosstech]

Are these headsets or headphones? Sounds to me like headphones...

Shouldn't be a problem. If you're using the same stereo headphone amp, what I would do is buy or build a Y-cable for the input, splitting the single mono source into two plugs with the same signal. This will be easier to do, since you only have to do one instead of every headphone you have. Plus, it's easily undoable if you want to go back to stereo again. You also won't have the potential problem of overloading the amplifier by doubling the load.

[Foxinabox10]

Yep, you're right, they're headphones.

I'm not sure you understand the problem we're having. Because the connector on the headphones is stereo, yet the rest of the system is mono, when we plug the headphones in, we're only getting sound in one ear. What I was thinking of doing was putting a mono connector on the headphones, thus sending the same source to both ears.

[Chaos is Born]

i think your best bet would be to go out and buy a mono to stereo adapter. they do sell them, and it would save your headphones for a later system and/or you don't need to convert any more headphones

[Foxinabox10]

I thought about adapters, but I figured that they would likely get lost with all the set-ups and break-downs. This system is used anywhere from once a month to three times in one week.

[koncept]

i would probably still do the adapters and super glue them onto the headphones. i did that with some other stuff and it worked well.

[Foxinabox10]

koncept, why did you decide to do this instead of just changing the connectors?

[koncept]

it was done because we were in a pinch, then it just got pushed aside due to other things. to keep from loosing them we super glued them on... if we had to we could take a knife and cut the glue and it would be back to normal...

edit: probably not one of the brightest things we've done but...oh well...

[Chaos is Born]

The way that i see this, you can either spend some money and time to change the connector now, and some money and time to change it back later. Or you spend a little bit of money (i believe the adapter your looking for runs about $5) and virtually no time changing between the two.

[Foxinabox10]

Yes, but if the adapters get lost, that's money down the drain.

I have decided that I'm going to replace the connectors. Are there any tricks with these machine fabricated molded cables/connectors currently on the headphones?