HELP!!!!.....RCA to XLR Termination

Hi Ugin! Here's how I do it. Unsolder old connectors with hot iron using cold scrap wire to soak up old excess solder. Cut off the tinned end of the wire. Remove about .5cm of insulation by holding wire tightly just below so as not to stretch it, and pull insulation up over new end. Buy desired gold or silver plated Neutrik connectors http://www.neutrikusa.com/ or more fancy gold or silver mined on some other planet (hehe). Heat the intersection of connector flanges and wire with hot iron, feed silver-content solder (3% silver from Radio Shack is the cheapest I could find) into intersection, not onto iron! Then lift away iron. Simple? Sure! Just practice on the removed connectors with scrap until you feel confident with the new ones. Remember that RCA's require only two conductors and XLR's have three...American Standard for XLR is 1. ground; 2. cold or minus (out of phase); 3. hot or plus (in phase). For European Standard reverse 2 and 3. So...if the center pin on your RCA has two wires, split them and connect them exactly to XLR's at both ends. If one wire only, connect it to pin 3. If the house burns down, don't blame me, haha. Good luck!

Thank a lot on on the responds. Is too expensive to send it back to factory for retermination, most likely I will DIY.

I would send it back to manufacturer also. I have some Nordost SPM re-terminated by Nordost and they came back looking like I bought them that way. FYI for Nordost owners, they charged me $35 per termination when I had it done plus return shipping.

Rockvirgo, question. So you would use pins 1 and 3 when replacing the rca with a xlr connector? I have a Fostex DAT on the way that only has balanced inputs and outpus, but the rest of my equipment is regular rca single ended so I need to convert one end of the cable to xlr's. Do I hvae this right? Thanks, grumpy.

Hi Grumpy. An exellent technical paper on this subject can be found on the RANE Pro Audio website at (http://www.rane.com/pdf/note110.pdf). It includes illustrations for 22 different output to input scenarios which you may run into. Note that the pin-outs for XLR connections in this paper are for the European standard, which most pro audio manufactures also use. You may want to check with Fostex to see which standard they use as Fostex's main focus is pro audio. Hope this helps.