Fun, and the Having of It

There is a little secret - a guilty pleasure, if you will - that I have. One of those things that, when someone else finds out, gets you looked at strangely. There are some out there that share this little secret with me.

I love to solder.

There. I said it. Oh, how I love to solder! I can do it for hours and hours, and never tire of it. The smell of burning flux, the way molten tin/lead looks like mercury, the Building of Things. It's always fun.

My career being in audio, I have built many a cable in my day. Literally thousands upon thousands of TRS, XLR, and RCA connectors found their permanent home on account of me. I build them short. I build them long. I split signals, or bring them back together. I build adapters. Want to connect Device A to Device B? I can build that. Need to get the unbalanced stereo output from your mixer into a line-in on your laptop? Hell, I made one of those yesterday, and I'll make two spares today, because Two Is One And One Is None (and because I get to build it).

Today, I'll build an adapter to allow both channels of a stereo output to combine in the left ear of a set of studio headphones, and both channels of a different stereo output to combine in the right ear of the same headphone. Could that be done with a mixer? Sure, if you want to pay for a mixer. Or, I could build it. Oh, yes. Yes I can.

This is where I stop, because it's even starting to creep me out.



tweaker