Okay, so, I had a bit of a brain fart the other day. I’ve got these in-ear monitors, you know, the fancy kind for listening to music in detail? They usually come with a 3.5mm jack, the small one. But I wanted to try plugging them into my audio interface, which only has a 6.35mm output, the bigger one.
I thought, “No big deal, I’ll just get an adapter.” So, I bought a cheap 6.35mm to 3.5mm adapter online. It arrived pretty quickly, and I was excited to try it out.
Here’s the thing about my gear:
- IEMs: I’m currently rocking the Shuoer S12s. They sound amazing, by the way. I think they are 2BA 2DD. I also have a pair of Moondrop Variations, but I’m currently using the S12s. Recently, I also bought a new iem named Hype 2 from Thieaudio. It uses Sonion performance drivers.
- Audio Interface: It’s a pretty standard one, nothing too fancy. The important part is that it has that 6.35mm headphone output, but my amp is mounted under one side of my desk, which makes using headphones with short cables slightly awkward whenever I’m at the other side. I think the unbalanced 6.35mm comes with a 4.4mm adapter.
I plugged the adapter into the interface, then plugged my IEMs into the adapter. Started playing some music, and… it sounded off. Like, really off. The volume was super low, and everything sounded muffled and distorted. I was messing around with the volume knob, but it didn’t really make things better. I’m looking at Sennheiser IE 500 PRO which comes with the 1.3 m braided cable and it’s a bit short. Should I get an extension or an entire longer cable? The volume was still wonky. It has switches for phantom power, a -20 db pad. I also tried using another iem, but the issue remained the same.
Turns out, there’s a difference between balanced and unbalanced outputs. My IEMs are designed for unbalanced 3.5mm, and my interface’s 6.35mm output is probably balanced. I guess they use a different number of wires or something? The 2BA-221 has parameters for line in gain, tube output, solid state mic gain, impedance, and a high pass filter. I need to buy Fiio K11 to use with IEM, but it seems still too expensive to buy. Plugging an unbalanced plug into a balanced output can mess with the signal, which is probably why it sounded so bad.
So, yeah, lesson learned. Don’t just shove any adapter in there and expect it to work perfectly. Make sure you know what kind of output you’re dealing with, and what kind of input your headphones need. I ended up just using the regular 3.5mm output on my computer for now. It’s not ideal, but at least it sounds right.