More enjoyable nights at work

Sorry if you don’t feel like doing some reading (I'm not saying you have to), but I feel like doing some typing, so here goes…Well I didn’t really get through all those Firefly episodes like I wished, but I'm still determined to get them all complete by midday today at the latest so I can watch the movie before Alex heads into work. Why didn’t I get thought all of it like planned? Because my body wanted sleep, so I got some in the morning, then my afternoon was pretty busy. I did however get something done yesterday that I wanted to. I wired up an XLR to 3.5mm stereo jack lead to use at work. I will sum up the situation that led to this. Mind any technical references that I make… hopefully most of you guys will understand what I'm talking about.

At work, the music that plays throughout the store is received via satellite and there is no access to the receiver to change what is playing or to input music from another source such as a CD player. The major problem with this though is the fact that the music rarely ever changes, apart from Christmas time which is even worse with carols and all. To make it even more annoying, when the playlist of songs is complete, everything will repeat in reverse order. It’s enough to drive you insane.

During the day this isn’t really much of an issue as you can barely hear the music over the ambient noise, however once the store closes and nightfill starts, the music can be heard more easily. For the past couple of weeks, we have been overriding the music with the help of the PA system. This was done by taping the button down on the microphone and putting a CD player next to it to broadcast music through the store. Since I am only with nightfill a few times a week, I have only experienced this s couple of times and after those couple of times, I just couldn’t take it anymore. The sound quality was really bad and the treble was through the roof making it uncomfortable.

I wanted to go one step further and input the CD player directly into the PA system. This seemed easy at first since the microphone inputs for the PA are XLR sockets. The one problem I found however was that it wasn’t a simple 3-pin XLR socket which has a standard configuration, but was a 5-pin XLR socket which is more prone to wiring variations according to manufacturer. Not only that, I couldn’t find any information on the pinout for this style XLR connector on the net. I ended up calling the manufacturer of the PA, Tecsound in the hopes that someone would be able to help me. Lucky for me, the person on the other end was kind enough to tell me what the pinout was despite the fact that I wasn’t a corporate customer (the company is corporate based).

Since this information isn’t really anywhere on the net, I will include it here in the event that someone else is after the same thing. For Tecsound PA systems with the 5-pin XLR push-to-talk microphones, the pinout is as follows: Pin 1-Sheild, Pin 2-Hot, Pin 3-Cold, Pin 4 and 5-Push-to-talk (short out to activate). Basically, this is just the same pinout as a 3-pin XLR with the addition of pins 4 and 5 for the purpose of push-to-talk. With that information, I went ahead and wired up my XLR to 3.5mm stereo jack lead. At the end of my shift last night, I tested this lead out and luckily nothing blew up. The music is so much clearer than having a speaker to microphone arrangement, well worth the effort of making the lead. So now my nights in nightfill will now be much more enjoyable now that we have our own music to listen to.