xxxmass + TRS

"Christmas," as it is commonly called, is coming up in mere days. Today was the last full shopping day, and as such, urgency was in the air. What the hell would all the children of America do if they didn't get their Xbox 360 games and what would happen to all the adults if they didn't exchange expensive items for other expensive items purchased by other adults? Everyone would probably be happier, there would be less unnecessary traffic and accompanying pollution, and Wal-Mart would go out of business. Okay, I guess the last part is a bit of a fantasy, but I'll defend on the premise that if Christmas was (were?) de-commercialized that perhaps people would do the same with their daily lives and THEN Wal-Mart and friends could finally implode and some of the small businesses that were destroyed by such bastions of consumerism could return.

I guess this started as a rather aimless post. It's going to slowly transform into a basic electronics lesson, starting...now.

I was at Best Buy attempting to purchase a certain circular piece of plastic with certain data on it that would show certain pictures when placed in a certain machine. I decided to take a walk over to the section of the store devoted to computer peripherals as I am considering the purchase of a new mouse of the silicon-related variety. During this, whilst playing with a mouse that had at least five buttons and not one, but TWO scroll wheels, I overheard a man with his wife discussing computer speakers in the same aisle. He was very determined to find a set of speakers with RCA inputs (those red and white sockets that are common on home entertainment equipment) to match his DVD player. I'm not sure why he was looking at the computer speakers for such an item, but that's beside the point. Computer speakers would work perfectly well with a DVD player. He didn't think so, that is unless they had RCA inputs. A few minutes into the situation, while the man was opening a box containing a set of speakers to investigate, a Best Buy employee arrived at the scene. Conversing occured and all members of this three person party seemed more confused than before. I, thinking to myself I would be helping, decided to go to another section of the store and grab an adapter cable (like this) that would solve all their problems, since the speakers the man was scoping out had a mini-jack input (headphone sized, typical for computer speakers). I brought my find back to the group, still perplexed, except now the Best Buy team member was trying to sell the guy a PC sound card that has nothing at all to do with the issue of connecting a DVD player to speakers. I politely proposed that this adapter would allow the man to do exactly what he wanted, and he dismissively responded with "yeah, I KNOW, but that wouldn't be in full stereo." This was wholly untrue.

On a normal, headphone-style mini-plug, there are three separate conductors. They are divided by two insulators, usually black plastic (or white in the case of iPod headphones, etc.) There is the 'tip' at the end, the 'ring' in the middle, and the largest one is the 'sleeve'. The tip and ring carry the signal for the left and right side of your headphones and they represent the positive (+) side of each. The sleeve is split up and goes to the 'ground', or negative (-) part of each speaker/headphone. RCAs are a little different. You can only carry one signal on each RCA plug along with the negative connection, since they only have two conductors. So, our friend at Best Buy would have been right about losing his "stereo" effect if there was only one RCA plug. However, this cable split into TWO RCAs. One for the left side, one for the right, combining for stereo. Here's a little diagram:

You see, both the left and right signal are kept apart, maintaining the stereo signal. The RCAs would have plugged into the back of his DVD player and then the mini-plug could have plugged into his computer speakers and everyone would be happy. I could have certainly argued with the man, but I decided to spend far more time explaining it virtually. He probably would have thought I was just some dingbat kid, anyway.