Weird DB25 shorting issue

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brewbacca

Well-known member
Joined
Aug 5, 2013
Messages
77
Hi all, I have a few DB25 to XLR/TRS snakes I made and some of them have a strange shorting issue I'm having a lot of trouble tracking down.

I have Netoek Series III I basically rebuilt and rewired. It has a bantam patchbay that is wired to DB25 jacks on the back of the console which is where I'm hooking up the snakes. The patchbay in question is not normalled and is meant to have a basic input/output scheme for outboard equipment. When one of the problematic snakes is hooked up to both the equipment and the console/patchbay, I'm getting a pin 2/tip short with pin1/sleeve on a couple patchbay channels.

There is no short in either the cable or the patchbay when:
- the cable is not connected to anything
- the cable is only hooked up to the equipment (a chandler tg2 and a brand new colour duo in this case)
- the cable is only hooked up to the console/patchbay
- when I remove the patchbay (leaving it wired and the cable connected to everything) and disconnect the bantam terminal/jack from the patchbay panel (but leave it wired).

I'm not able to see any shorts in the DB25 connectors or the patchbay or the XLR and TRS connectors at the equipment side.

My assumption is that there is actually short between pin 2/tip of the effected channel and pin 1/sleeve of a different channel since when the terminal is disconnected (and the sleeve of the TT jack is not connected to the other sleeves via the patchbay panel) there is no short. If I touch the sleeve contact of the TT jack to another jack's sleeve contact, the short returns. This tells me that the short would be occurring in the DB25 connector somewhere, but shouldn't that short still be there when the cable is disconnected?

Any thoughts?

(Full disclosure: the DB25 soldering is definitely not my best work, and I've left the sleeve connections bare instead of trying to work in heatshrink to an already tight space. Not sure if this is bad or not?)
 
Ok, so, the issue is that I'm an idiot  :D

I just had the pins reversed on the xlr connections on the snake above. I'm pretty sure this is the issue elsewhere and I'm not sure why I didn't catch this before.

Disregard  :-\
 

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