Loud & Low 8th Gen Civic - Time to say good bye to her.

[scooter99]

Thanks Kris. Wheels may be a while off now. They keep getting pushed back. More important things to do. I may just fix these ones I have and leave them alone. I don't know yet.

I appreciate the words though.

[scooter99]

I apparently forgot to take pics of the goodies that I got this weekend, so I'll make sure to do that tonight and get those posted up.

I didn't get much as far as pics from the Sky High trip this weekend. But I had to do a vs pic, with the Sky High Truck and my civic. Check em out!

Peek A Boo!!

Literally half way under the truck.

Kyle and Laura were nice enough to think of me while at DC Audio this weekend, and gave me a lanyard from DC. Then Jon gave me a nice SHCA one. I don't usually have stuff on my rear view mirror, but i put those up there, and well, they just look at home there. So maybe they'll stay!

Wasn't there for very long, well long enough to help with the new stuff that had just come in, and then did some running around and just bsing. But I'm sure I'll be up there real soon again. Big things going on up there.

[scooter99]

So while I had the soldering Iron out the other night doing the harness up, I decided to keep it out and make a pair of coaxial rcas. i had said before sometime that i was going to do a little tutorial on this, so I guess here that is.

Got my gear set up and ready to work. Coaxial cable, 2 RCA ends, solder station, heat shrink, techflex, etc.

Solder station and heat gun

First thing you do is strip the outer (black in this case) jacket. I did this with a knife cause I couldn't find my coaxial cable stripper. But i would not recommend doing it this way. So jacket stripped, braided outer shield pulled down.

I usually will put the RCA in the helpers hands and fill it up with solder. That way when it's time to put the cable in the center cup, it's ready to heat and sink right in.

Soldered up the center pin, and I also put a little on the forks to get a solid connection on the outer shield. You have to be extremely careful here, because you don't want to melt the jacket and risk going too deep. Little heat, in little spurts I've found works best. You don't need a lot of solder here, just a little. Too much build up will also not allow the outer barrel to go over it.

Another thing I do with my rca's is separate the heatshrink. Actually i know alot of people don't even use heat shrink on these. Not a great idea. I do it, and I separate them.

Center pin shrinked and making sure that no fibers from the outer shield are in the shrink. This isolates the center pin from the outer shield.

Then I shrink the outer shield and overlap it on the center pin shrink. This isolates them and gives a nice protection for the whole thing.

Then slide the outer barrel on and screw it down.

Now you can dress it up if you like. I decided to get a little creative with this one, but you can use one color or do it this way or however you want. I want to make sure that the pair can be separated and know what's what by looking at the flex on it. So I like to usually use different flexes on the different cables.

I used black flex on the main run of the wire, then terminated into the colored flex with heat shrink. This one is blue, with blue shrink. The other was a black with gold strip going through it with black flex.

[scooter99]

Next what you want to do, when you've done the other side, is test them to make sure you don't have any cross connection. Fibers touching the center pin and outer shield. Basically what you do is touch the center pin with your dmm probes, and if you get a reading, you have a good connection.

As you can see, with the probes not touching, with the setting I'm on, I get a 1 reading. Which is basically nothing.

So when we touch the center pin on one side, and the outer shield on the other probe, we get that same reading. This is good, and means we have no cross connections. So we're good with this one.

These are the final products. These were done pretty quickly. I usually will label them for whatever they're going to be used for. In this case they were just quick and for testing purposes on a build. Should really take you about 30-45 minutes per cable on these. That's about how long it takes me anyway. Now you can go install and enjoy!

So that's it for now. Like I said, I have some equipment pics to take and I'll do that tonight.

Probably going to be a few days before any more updates. I'm trying to get the garage cleaned up and boxes emptied this week so we can get our cars in the garage. So I'm gonna be busy this week with that. Hopefully more this weekend. Unless I can sneak out and get some stuff done on the amp racks !

Thanks for checking it out!

Don't forget to check out and like my facebook page to get updates before they hit anywhere else!

[Trey_Dog650]

Cable looks nice man! I like

Moar updates meow

[Wicks]

CLEAN work on those RCAs!

Love the pics under the SHCA truck, almost scary.

BTW, Do your Crescendo's amps have differential inputs?

[scooter99]

Ok remind me, differential is which, unbalanced?

I emailed Crescendo and asked them and they told me Unbalanced.

[Carbon]

Nice work man! Rcas look great!

[Wicks]

Ok remind me, differential is which, unbalanced?

I emailed Crescendo and asked them and they told me Unbalanced.

...really?

With those fancy RCA connectors, I would have bet they were differential...

Differential = Balanced

Single Ended = Unbalanced

You can check by ohm'ing out the outside RCA conductor to the amp's ground terminal.

~0 ohms = unbalanced.

Regardless, where are you mounting your 360.3?

That has differential inputs and selectable outputs.

What I'm getting at is that you could make use of differential inputs by using twisted pair cables (even though you make those sweet COAX cables).

So you could run twisted pair to the 360.3 and then COAX to the amps.

Unless you have no noise to be concerned with, then by all means just go with what you have.

I just recent my learned that my 5K has differential inputs..............after I went and got some nice SMD COAX cables....

When I ran it a little while ago, I didn't notice much for noise though so I'm going to try it out as-is and see how it sounds.

[scooter99]

Ok remind me, differential is which, unbalanced?

I emailed Crescendo and asked them and they told me Unbalanced.

...really?

With those fancy RCA connectors, I would have bet they were differential...

Differential = Balanced

Single Ended = Unbalanced

You can check by ohm'ing out the outside RCA conductor to the amp's ground terminal.

~0 ohms = unbalanced.

Regardless, where are you mounting your 360.3?

That has differential inputs and selectable outputs.

What I'm getting at is that you could make use of differential inputs by using twisted pair cables (even though you make those sweet COAX cables).

So you could run twisted pair to the 360.3 and then COAX to the amps.

Unless you have no noise to be concerned with, then by all means just go with what you have.

I just recent my learned that my 5K has differential inputs..............after I went and got some nice SMD COAX cables....

When I ran it a little while ago, I didn't notice much for noise though so I'm going to try it out as-is and see how it sounds.

They look good, but not that fancy. $0.75 a piece. They're about the cheapest metal ones out there.

My 360 is getting mounted in the trunk lid. That was what I was thinking about doing, but I'm either going bluetooth or optical from the tablet in the dash for input, so really it'll be the output that matters.

I just want to learn more about it and how it works. I don't think I understand fully balanced vs unbalanced. I'm good with pictures and understanding, but when I read it, it just isn't sinking in.