Today I decided to create another patch cable, within my long line of patch cables, important for sending signals from effects, whether they be discrete analog effects, or effects which process the signal digitally, then spit them back out in an analog wave.
It was important to make this cable because I was using an expensive higher grade cable which I need somewhere else. The cable that I used is a standard XLR cable which has ground signal 1 and signal 2. You can go read on Wikipedia why XLR needs that in detail, but it has to do with the length of an XLR cable which can go to 30 m if you need it.
The signal that I need to carry only needs an unstable connection which means a signal and a ground. My XLR cable is een overkill but I don't have any other cable.
Enthusiastically I warmed up my trusted Weller soldering iron, waited till it heated up, took my fantastic cable stripper stripped the cable on both ends, prepared the connectors beforehand and started soldering.
Everything went smoothly I've been soldering since I'm a 7 year old kid. Of course quality control is important so my multimeter was tuned on diode.
For the uninformed, a diode is a electrical component which only lets current on one side, and then blocks it from the other side. This setting is also used to check the connections & continuity in cables and on ports.
When I was done something strange occurred. I measured the cable and the mass, the common was open. Checking both sides of the soldering work showed it was perfect. Not believing that there could be disruption in the cable, I stripped one side then measured the cable and came to the same conclusion broken Mass. I caught and stripped another small section of the cable at the other side and still an open Mass.
So I've had a piece of XLR cable, that didn't ground and I had used that as a stable cable, which had given me all kinds of interesting artifacts, that I alleviated by just stripping out that one piece of cable, years ago.
Now a regular person would take that cable and chunk it on the side. I on the other hand I'm not a regular person, I started stripping / dismantling radios when I was two and when I was five I had such a skill that it looked like a trained electronic professional had stripped the radio. Are we talking about radios in the Tube era, where hundreds & hundreds of Volts and many Ampères were going through those circuits.
XLR cable has three conductors; signal one, signal two and ground. I used the white conductor as the new Mass, the new ground and used the red conductor as a signal two, thus making a balanced XLR cable unbalanced because the ground conductor was broken.
It was a wonderful trip, taking this piece of XLR cable and reusing it again even though only two conductors were usable effectively.
I may provide photographs later.
**wiremix** — A simple TUI audio mixer for PipeWire
Supports adjusting volumes, routing audio between devices and applications
Written in Rust & built with 
GitHub: 
+300╭
x5╭⁂+3╭(Ⓐ+a 
