I have done something similar. We were going to play Wii one night but my friend brought the wrong adapter.

As the old saying goes: “Copper is copper!”
But he used a paper clip, that is steel.
Twelve audiophiles around the world just had seizures
That’s the joke. They would claim that … I don’t know… electrons are going to fall off that copper wire or something like that.
I mean, if it makes good contact and is not moving it is not going to affect audio quality any more than an equivalent length of extra cable would’ve
Once someone tried to tell me that the wrong cable impedance to the speakers affected sound. Asked him what is the wavelength at audio frequencies, conversation died.
If they were passive speakers being powered through the cables and an amplifier wouldn’t the additional impedance of the cable result in a (probably imperceptible) reduction on volume? I agree it wouldn’t effect the waveform, and thus, the quality of the sound though.
Resistance can reduce the volume. E.g. if your wires are too thin for the current you want to send over them. The guy was talking about impedance.
Impedence is the combination of resistance (ordinary resistance to current) and reactance which is resistance specific to alternating current which comes from the capacitors and coils in the equipment. Even a squiggly circuit trace can create reactance. So, impedence is resistance.
Whatch this short for a clear explanation:
https://youtube.com/shorts/tanon58nW1o
From what I’ve read, and from talking to a guy who own a music studio near me, impedance mismatch is a real thing in audio equipment. At best, it’ll lower the sound level causing you to have to crank up the volume, which just puts more strain on your equipment. Worse, it can cause crackling from waveform peaking. At the very worst, it can damage equipment.
Brushing it off just because the guy doesn’t know the wavelength of audio signals is a dick move. No wonder he stopped talking to you. I bet you, yourself, know a lot of things, a lot of true things, that you can’t explain to the utmost detail.
“You say quarks are combined with the strong force to make protons, huh? Well, what’s the binding force between an up and down quark? Oh, you don’t know? Curious.”
Impedance mismatch between two pieces of equipment (amplifier and speaker, in this case) is a thing, and depending on how the amplifier is built can be a problem. But for the piece of wire connecting them to behave like a transmission line it needs to be a significant fraction of the wavelength of the signal, which at audio frequency is quite a lot, so unless you have your amplifier on the other side of town it is totally irrelevant. The guy was blabbing nonsense. We didn’t talk about quarks.
Looking through the comments. Random engineers on Lemmy MacGyvering the most insane adapter on the spot made my day

Tv started acting up today, found a bulged cap on the main board, it’s a trough hole, the only one I find to match is a surface mount. I used some resistor legs to poke through the TV board and soldered the surface mount cap to the poking legs. TV is back to life ! Yay !

I once saw someone make a video cable by dissecting the strands of a power cable and insulating them with packing table.
In place of a 3 cord red/white/yellow cable? That’s a simple analogue cable, it’ll be fine
No. In place of a HDMI cable. It was somehow short enough that interference wasn’t an issue.
… Wouldn’t there be enough electrical power in this that you might wanna cover that in electrical tape?
I’ve not jerry rigged an amp before, but I did once build a ramshackle ‘home media pc’ for some roommates once, out of old spare pc parts i had lying around, using the box their xbox360 came in as a ‘case’.
Got a paperclip with some rubberized covering, snipped a bit off the two ends, and then you had to short the right two pins on the … whatever the socket is that would normally go to the front io panel is, you had to do that to turn it on lol.
It appears to be a line signal, so it should be fine. But then again, we can’t see what’s on the other end. Could be a nuclear power plant for all we know.
Oh you’re right!
I thought it might have been the main connection between the guitar and the amp… that would have a lot more current in it, potentially, right?
I keep forgetting that I actually need to use the glasses that I now have, lol.
No, the guitar to amp “instrument line” has even lower current than the line in.
The only hazard with music instruments is if someone turns on phantom power 48V to a microphone that doesn’t use it. Then the grill can give a nasty shock and typically right on the lips.
Huh!
Well TIL, thank you!




