Audio Adapters

If you use earbuds with your Personal Mixer, it’s not uncommon to need an adapter to connect the earbud’s 1/8-inch TRS stereo plug to a standard 1/4-inch stereo jack. These handy little widgets are readily available, and are truly useful except when they make a problem rather than fixing one.

We have found that often times a poor quality 1/8-inch to 1/4-inch adapter makes poor contact internally. This causes scratchy sounding audio, intermittent connections, loss of stereo separation, or no audio at all. The same is true for cables used to extend the length of a headphone output.

Worst of all is something Aviom sees as a manufacturer—a bad adapter can make the user think that the product it is connected to is malfunctioning. This problem is made worse when the user only has one adapter to work with and there is no way to really troubleshoot the issue.  Since the Personal Mixer allows the customer to hear the problem caused by the poor connections in the adapter, they incorrectly assume that the Personal Mixer is broken and send it in to be repaired. Of course, since the Personal Mixer was never broken to begin with, it tests perfectly.

Every Aviom Personal Mixer is tested by hand and must pass a battery of tests before it can be shipped.

The customer is without their mixer a couple of weeks. The only people that make out in this deal are the shipping companies.

In the video, we have connected an A320 Personal Mixer to a set of pro headphones that offer an 1/8-inch output through two different adapters. The audio heard was recorded in real time using the headphones as speakers. In the simple desktop video, you can clearly hear that the audio cuts in and out, and at one point is totally silent while using adapter #1. When we switch to adapter #2, the problem is completely gone. We can wiggle the headphone cable and the audio remains 100% clean.

It’s time to throw adapter #1 in the trash.

Extension Cables

Similar problems with intermittent audio connections can occur when using extension cables to increase the cable length of your headphones or earbuds. The tiny connections must mate accurately or the signal will cut in and out as you move around.

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