[sdiy] Banana vs. 1/4" question

[Cynthia Webster]

on 4/15/03 3:53 PM, patchell at patchell at silcom.com wrote:

> Well, one problem I see with Banana's (and I hope that this can be
> corrected), is that there are no good PC board mount bananas, where as you can
> get good 1/4 inch phone jacks....of course, this only matters if you are
> trying
> to cut down on the amount of wiring as I am...if anybody thinks they know of a
> nice PC board mount banana, please point me to it.

Sure!  use an off the shelf solderless crimp-on connector onto the back
spade "solderlug" of a Johnson brand female panel mount banana jack.

Three vertical holes can form a slot, or just use the single hole for the
neck of the crimp-on connector,  (pretty simple actually, but it took our
own Ken Stone to figured it out!)

(This also means that assemblies can be disconnected and reconnected
again after soldering!)

We are using this technique on the Gate Sequencer assemblies,
and it is a smashing success!

Thanks Ken!

Cynthia




> 
> Michael Schulze wrote:
> 
>> A while back we had a thread about the ideal modular synth connector.  I'v
>> just finished my first module - a quad vco with 36 1/4" jacks.  As I gaze
>> longingly at the Milton sequencer I remember how cool it was on the big
>> Buchla system in college to be able to split control voltages by just
>> sticking a banana into another banana already plugged it.  Very conducive to
>> improvisation and patching on the fly.
>> 
>> As I remember the thread the only real disadvantage to bananas was that they
>> could not be normalled and you needed to adapt signals from the outside
>> world.  I don't care about these points - were there any other disadvantages
>> I am forgetting?
>> 
>> I am actually considering redoing all 36 of these jacks to end up with an
>> all-banana modular.
> 
> --
> -Jim
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> * Visit:http://www.silcom.com/~patchell/
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