I read online that the second and third pins by the volume control are the left and right channels but is the ground? Is it going to be fourth pin?
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uk
Ground is the first one in most of the guides, if i'm not mistaking. In fact ground could be anything, power switcher, or the fourth pin. Question, do you even have to use ground or it's just for safety side?
Last edited by platforma (Jul 8, 2011 4:30 pm)
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Don't you have to use ground when adding a new jack? All tutorials for prosounding a DMG use the ground and it's actually like the 4th or 5th pin in those as well.
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Rhode Island
Are you adding a new jack? You can just do an internal prosound with the pocket
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If I do an internal prosound, then I lose the headphone capability, right? That's why I was going to add new jack. Isn't that why everyone adds a new jack to their DMG's when doing the prosound mod?
...I guess I should just go buy a multimeter and figure this out on my own then...
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uk
You add a 1/4 jack or RCA's to make it suitable for your mixer/midi inputs etc. Not for improving quality of sound (of course if you add very expensive 3.5 jack gold plated it would make a difference I guess).
Shield = Ground.
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England
platforma wrote:
You add a 1/4 jack or RCA's to make it suitable for your mixer/midi inputs etc. Not for improving quality of sound (of course if you add very expensive 3.5 jack gold plated it would make a difference I guess)
Gold-plated plugs and sockets do not make the slightest bit of difference to sound quality. Ever.
Electrons will flow through gold no better than they will through any other conductive cable.
Their only advantage is that they don't corrode like a normal connector would after 30 odd years.
Don't waste money on gold connectors. Unless your cables and the rest of your studio are made out of gold, it's pointless.
Last edited by InactiveX (Jul 8, 2011 8:53 pm)
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platforma wrote:
You add a 1/4 jack or RCA's to make it suitable for your mixer/midi inputs etc. Not for improving quality of sound (of course if you add very expensive 3.5 jack gold plated it would make a difference I guess).
I am pretty sure the original intention of the prosound mod is to improve the sound quality. That is why all of the modders out there offer 1/8" as a standard common mod. When my pocket is running through my mixer, it puts out a nasty hum and I have been told the 1/8" prosound mod will decrease or even eliminate that. I will try the connections that are shown in that picture you posted even though that isn't a pocket. If it's doesn't work, I'll desolder the connection and try again.
Thanks.
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Rhode Island
Exactly. Prosound increases the audio quality. Period. On the pocket it will reduce/eliminate the ground hum when recording.
While RCA and 1/4" are there to allow easier connectivity to mixers you can just as easily get a 1/8" to 1/4" adapter. Not sure what you meant by Suitable for midi inputs.
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England
I'll try to clear this up.
If you add a prosound mod, you can either use the headphone socket or add your own socket. If you use the headphone socket, ground will already be connected (otherwise nothing would come out of your cans) so you simply need to disconnect the other socket pins and route L and R to the socket as per photo above.
If you add a new socket, then that will of course need its L and R connected, and the ground pin must be connected to a ground (or shield in photo) point on the Game Boy board.
platforma wrote:
Ground is the first one in most of the guides, if i'm not mistaking. In fact ground could be anything, power switcher, or the fourth pin. Question, do you even have to use ground or it's just for safety side?
Ground points are all over the board. A multimeter can be used to find them, with a simple continuity test. Re Question, it's not for safety, it's essential for a circuit to work. Electricity, as every skoolboy no, is the effect of the flow of electrons. Think of ground as a drain where the electrons are collected up before being whizzed off back round the circuit again, flowing all the time. Disconnect ground, and the electrons cannot flow = no electricity.
nerdsome wrote:
platforma wrote:You add a 1/4 jack or RCA's to make it suitable for your mixer/midi inputs etc. Not for improving quality of sound (of course if you add very expensive 3.5 jack gold plated it would make a difference I guess).
I am pretty sure the original intention of the prosound mod is to improve the sound quality. That is why all of the modders out there offer 1/8" as a standard common mod. When my pocket is running through my mixer, it puts out a nasty hum and I have been told the 1/8" prosound mod will decrease or even eliminate that. I will try the connections that are shown in that picture you posted even though that isn't a pocket. If it's doesn't work, I'll desolder the connection and try again.
I think it was originally done to give a signal at line level, to suit sound recording conventions. But I may be wrong. Also IIRC, the mod (tips hat to Trash80) was found to improve SNR on certain models of Game Boy. 1/8" is appropriate because it is a good fit for the Game Boy. It's not exactly the case that "the 1/8" prosound mod will decrease or even eliminate" the noise - prosound may help, but the choice of 1/8" is irrelevant.
nerdsome wrote:
...I guess I should just go buy a multimeter and figure this out on my own then...
Of course you should! Mine is always within easy reach! 
Hope this helps!
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uk
Thanks for your answer InactiveX!
Sorry if it's a dumb question. If I haven't removed the standart mini-jack input and just wired L and R to the jack connectors, do I still need to run a wire from shield to a ground? I'm just confused a bit 
Last edited by platforma (Jul 9, 2011 9:45 am)
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England
If you are using the headphone socket then no, the ground is already connected. You just need to wire L and R.
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To clear up the question about internal and heaphones, with the internal version you do not need to remove the standard speaker as it shuts off when you Plug a line into the output, so headphones or a mixer, it shuts off the standard speaker. here's a picture of a prosound pocket board:
(also notice the removal of em2 and em3 jumpers, down near the jack)
Last edited by 12ianma (Jul 9, 2011 10:59 am)
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Thanks all that pretty much answered my question. Except for one: if I were to add an external jack, headphones won't work on it. I'm aware of that. But if I prosound a pocket using the original jack, do I lose the headphone capability as if it was an external jack? If not, then I don't see the point in adding an external jack and I will just prosound it using the original jack. But if I am going to lose the headphone capability by doing an internal prosound, then I just want an external jack. The speaker is useless to me. I can barely hear it anyway.