by lini » 31 Jul 2012 22:57
Raphael: Well, in theory one could use separate shield and signal ground with DIN cabling - but in practice it's hardly ever done that way (in fact you'll usually rather see combined ground configurations...). So, if anything, DIN cabling has a slight plus in terms of convenience, as the user needn't care about left & right - and one only needs one cable for connecting a recorder (so the user also needn't care about signal direction). However, on the other hand no left & right also means no convenient channel swapping for problem diagnosis - and cables and pins are pretty close together, so that there can be increased crosstalk. And if one is honest, one has to admit that regular consumer grade DIN connectors and ready-made cables typically were only of mediocre quality - and nowadays it's already rather difficult to find decent DIN plugs at all, even over here in Germany. I guess, if they had gone for higher quality XLR style plugs and jacks insteas, my opinion might be different - but in the usual form DIN cabling really existed I actually don't miss it at all. Even more so the bulky "Würfel 5" DIN connection for headphones - and the rather wimpy DIN connection for loudspeakers, which is only good for rather thin cables. So I was actually happy to see the DIN cabling being dropped pretty rapidly in the early 80s.
And, just by the way, I never was much of a fan of our European Scart/Euro-AV connection, either. Granted though, that packed quite a few in- and outputs into a fairly compact connector, so I can see why the manufacturers went for that...
Greetings from Munich!
Manfred / lini
