this confusion of my is absolutely unimportant but i am curries.
I have this 3,5 to 6,3 TRS adapter. It is defective but in a really weird way. Instead of having just a loos connection between left an right if I move the cable it is more like only the „soundstage“ gets wider or narrower.
What I mean with that is, that both sides loos an equal amount of something… causing the sound to feel way more narrow… like all instruments are in the middle of my head instead of to the left or right.
What causes this behavior?
My guess:
The contacts of L (tip) and R (ring) are ok but the GND (sleeve) has a bad connection and therefore impacts L&R equally?
But why does a bad GND connection mainly impact the soundstage and separation of the sound? Or am I hearing something wrong?
Wear and tear, manufactured bad, weathering from wear and tear. Oxidation is the enemy. Just possible reasons. I have a 1/4 adapter I don’t use because it sounds like shit compared to the half a dozen other adapters I own. Bad manufacturing I would guess in my case.
The connector is brand spanking new. So it might be manufacturing.
Oh wow, thanks for taking the time to make this beautiful drawing.
So, the increased resistance of the TRS (because of manufacturing error) could cause a decrease in fidelity? Because the music really sound pretty much the same it is just the highs that gets muddier and the soundstage gets narrower.
Ok I am going way to deep into this now and am doing stupid stuff because i have absolutely now clue what i am doing…
Regarding the decrease in the highs because of the bad connection. I just hocked my headphones — using the adapter — up to a sinwave generator to see if could replicate the decrease in the heigh pitches. I couldn’t.
So the theoretical and plausible increase of resistance due to the loos connection doesn’t impact the highs when isolated. But why are they impacted when in a music track? Is it because playing a whole song takes more power than a single sinwave?
If I had to guess you have some sort of signal leakage between L+R, this will colapse the sound stage and depending on how it’s happening, make vocals or any other centrally imaged signal get very quiet.
I’ve had this happen to me and vocals seem to vanish. Best guess either L or R is partially shorted to ground in the cable, or the floating ground is following one of them.
ups, curious*