Is it best to use a mono cable when sending audio to your sound card from your scanner or a stereo cable? I.E radio shacks 1/8 male to male dubbing cable or 1/8 male to male Stereo cable. Thanks for your help and advice.
Audio Cable for streaming feeds
- Thread starter ffryan76
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It depends on your hardware. If you are using a headphone jack of a scanner, its probably stereo and if you are using line in on your computer its also stereo. if you are using a mic jack on the computer it may be mono.
I would suggest a professional cable, purpose built - for scanner feeds I only use shielded cables professionally made from here:
3.5mm Connector Assemblies
I use the SI9-XX model a lot.
KJ6HCB
Member
$15.50 a foot? What a joke.
Its the best shielded cable you will ever have for your feed. I have about six of these cables for scanner feeds and don't regret a penny. If more people used good cables, we'd have a lot of clean sounding feeds out there without hum and background noises, etc.
Total overkill. I run one of the cleanest sounding feeds on this site, and I'm doing it with a homemade audio cable based on a $3 Radio Shack piece of junk cable.
There's a lot more to it than just wasting $15 on a hyped up cable. For starters, eliminating any potential for a ground loop, which drives me nuts whenever I hear that 60 Hz hum on a feed. Getting the audio levels correct is the next most important thing. Far too many people have the volume on the scanner cranked way too high, resulting in distortion of the audio. You have to find the sweet spot between the scanner's volume level and the PC's audio input level so you get a clean, undistorted signal. Ideally you want the peak level to never go above -1 dB to avoid clipping, while also avoiding unnecessarily amplifying any ambient noise from the scanner's audio amp.
If you do it right, even the $3 "piece of junk" cable will yield the exact same result as the overpriced Monster Cable. :wink:
I am using a radio shack attenuating mono cable (1/8 male to male dubbing cable) and am using a 800mhz two-way portable radio to broadcast the feed (or trying to) and I am having issues getting the feed to register (low or no audio). I THINK, because I am using the attenuating cable, it is causing the audio to be low. Is this correct thinking? Thanks for you help. I am not looking to spend a lot on this so radio shack cables are what I need to stick to.
c5corvette i appreciate your input but expense needs to be low .
c5corvette i appreciate your input but expense needs to be low .
W2PMX
Member
If you're feeding the mic in, you're doing it correctly. If you're feeding the line in, attenuating the signal would cause very low audio.
W8RMH
Feed Provider Since 2012
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