Aux-in cable

[CathJ]

I finally managed to find a cable to connect my iPod to my car radio, only to find that I'm only getting sound out of one speaker (which is the same thing that happened with the first cable I bought a few months ago, which stopped working altogether).

To make sure it's not a problem with the car radio, I've tried it with the microphone input on my laptop, and that also seems to be only picking up one channel. It's particularly annoying, because it's not like I'm just getting the left and right channels merged together into a single mono channel, I'm missing one channel entirely.

So: is this cable also stuffed, or do these cables just not handle stereo? (I can't see why they wouldn't; if headphones can, surely a cable with headphone jacks on each side can?)

 

[howardb]

Hi CathJ,
Does the plug look similar to these:

The one on the left with the single band is mono and the other is stereo - how many black bands does your's have?

 

[DJ...]

Cant really provide an answer unless we can see the cable. Some auxilliaries dont replicate mono through both channels and some auxilliary inputs only have inputs for one channel too (dont ask me why). I am assuming that it is a mini-jack output from the ipod and mini-jack input to aux in on the radio? If you change the radio output to mono you might be able to solve your roblem but not all car radios have this setting anymore. Mini-jack cables are often mono so check the pic above and let us know.

 

[CathJ]

It's definitely the stereo jacks (with the two black bands), which proves that it should be able to handle stereo.

So there are two possibilities:
1) The cable isn't carrying both channels,
or 2) The car radio can't handle stereo AND recording via the mic-in on my laptop can't handle stereo.

I'm guessing that the first is the more likely problem. The radio does allow you to set the left/right balance for aux-in, so I would take that means it does support stereo; and I'm fairly sure I've recorded stereo via the mic-in before.