Repairing an XLR Cable

EQUIPMENT

I was on set with my crew earlier this year, getting ready to shoot a tight hour of interviews. We set up the cameras, the lighting, and everything looked great. Then we plugged in the boom mic for a test.

“testing… testing… one two three…”

We were barely getting anything in the headphones. We went through the troubleshooting steps: turn up the volume… tap the mic… is the mic getting power … wiggle the connections…?

Finally we swapped cables and BINGO. Crystal clear.

That’s why we bring backups!

I learned this trick from a colleague: coil up the bad cable, wrap a loop of white gaff tape around it so it doesn’t get mixed up with the good ones, and pack it away to deal with later.

XLR Cable marked with tape for later repair

Later…

Well, 10 months later I had a slow week to tidy the office and troubleshoot some equipment issues. There was that marked cable, in my to-do pile.

Now, the only thing I dread more than sending gear to the landfill is dealing with a warranty department. It was worth doing a little investigating before such drastic measures.

As it turns out, XLR cables are delightfully simple gear. There are three wires in the cable, and three corresponding pins or slots on each connector. High quality cables are built to be repaired - which means they’re built for easy troubleshooting.

If it can’t be repaired, it was designed broken.

The cable itself didn’t appear damaged, so I unscrewed the shielding from the end connectors to check there. I laughed when I saw what was inside…

broken xlr connector

Love it when the damage is obvious. See how the wire with pink insulation is exposed and crossing two of the pins? Not good.

For reference, I opened up a working cable from a different brand. this is what I found:

broken xlr connector That’s excellent. (Note it’s ok for the wire on the left to be un-insulated like that.) By the way, the good XLR cable is this one by Kopul, and purchased from B&H.

Time to make the gross cable look like the pretty cable…

How to Repair a Broken XLR Cable

You will need: Wire cutters, wire strippers, soldering equipment

Also helpful to have: multimeter, bench vise, heat-shrink tubing

  1. Check for visible damage like cuts in the insulation, exposed wires, or missing pins on the male end.
  2. Unscrew the shields on the connectors and look for visible problems like broken wires, wires touching, etc. If your connectors don’t unscrew, or if the pins are damaged, you may need to purchase new connectors.
  3. If you can’t visibly see a problem, you can check continuity on each of the wires with a multimeter.* This is optional, but really helpful in troubleshooting. You want check for continuity between the matching pins on each connector. You also want to check for no continuity between the separate wires. In my photo above, for example, the continuity meter would alert me that wire 1 and 2 were connected. With the continuity probes connected, wiggle the connectors around and wiggle parts of the cable to figure out where the problems lie.
  4. Repairing Connectors: If your issues are at the connectors, this is a pretty straightforward repair. Using your soldering equipment, desolder the three wires from the damaged connector. Strip back the wires, and solder them back on the correct pins.** It can be helpful to use a bench vise to (carefully) hold your connector still while soldering.
  5. Reassemble the connectors and test the cable

If part of the actual cable is damaged, you can cut out the damaged part and make a shorter cable with the steps above, or possibly two shorter cables if you have an extra pair of connectors.

If your XLR cable has seen a ton of use, or was made poorly, you might have internal damage all the way down. In that situation, it’s time for a new one; but if you’re throwing the cable away, you can cut the connectors off and save them for future repairs if they’re in good condition.

Worth it

This was easy to troubleshoot, and the repaired gear is in probably in better condition than it was when first purchased. In fact, this is so easy to inspect, you could check your XLR connectors when first purchased or before an important shoot where every backup counts.

Notes:

This video helped me a lot: https://youtu.be/itY6zUG9rSg. I love his trick of ‘plugging in’ the XLR connectors to an unimportant piece of equipment instead of clamping in a vise.

*Any standard multimeter has a “continuity” mode, which helps you detect if a signal can get from Point-A to Point-B. Connect one probe of your multimeter to to Pin-One on the XLR’s male connector, and insert the other probe to the corresponding hole on the female connector.

**Note that the positions of pins are reversed on each connector. If your connectors don’t have the 1-2-3 labels, you can plug the two connectors together to see which one matches which. The numbers aren’t important, just that the connections are correct.

Further Reading

Next: Watercolor Newtons Cradle
Previously: Documentaries at Triff 2023

Tags: Repair , Sustainability