AW: RE: The great banana debate

[Don Tillman]

   From: Haible Juergen <Juergen.Haible at nbgm.siemens.de>
   Date: Thu, 20 Feb 1997 12:55:00 +0100

   The good thing with phone jacks is that you always have the *choice*:
   Shielded cables which carry ground, or
   Shielded cables with ground lifted at one end
   Unshielded one-wire cables.
   With bananas, you don't have a choice.

Also with 1/4-inch phone plugs:

*Quality cables of all lengths are readily available and inexpensive.

*If you run out unexpectedly you can just steal more from a guitar
player.
   
*You can have "normalized jacks".  Like on the ARP2600, the jack
includes a switch contact to connect to something useful if there's
nothing plugged in.

*You can connect to the outside world easily.  (This is very important
for me.)  (And if you've got a modular system with normalized jacks,
it could very well be that the jacks are more likely to be used to
connect to an external device than something else on the modular!)

   If I would ever build a Modular again, I would use *stereo*
   1/4" jacks and make all inputs and outputs symmetrical.
   * Avoids a lot of trouble with hum
   * Fully compatible with standard (unsymmetrical) 1/4" connections
   * Not as expensive as you might think: A one-opamp differential
     input stage would be enough for rejection of low frequency
     (i.e. hum) common mode signals.

And you can insert the plug halfway to instantly invert the polarity
of any signal!  

  -- Don