4kilo
Well Known Member
When I installed my electronics, I was very careful to be a good boy and isolate all of my audio from the airframe, use shielded cable, etc...
My ongoing audio problem is the quality of my portable music. I could fiddle with connections in the air and sometimes get good quality sound, but most of the time the music was weak and distorted (all of the other audio sounds great). I have spent hours insuring continuity and changing connectors, but nothing helped. I even tried different ipods in hope that the first one had some type of connection problem.
Today I was sitting in the airplane again fiddling with the connections, and accidentally discovered that if I held the ipod while making good contact myself on a grounded part of the airframe, the sound quality was great! I pulled the fiber isolation washers out of the music jack so that the jack makes contact with the airframe, and the quality of the music is better over the airplane headset than it is with ear-buds that came with the ipod. Unfortunately, a test flight shows that I do get alternator noise now, and I never did before. Right now I would rather have good music quality than eliminate the noise (it is not that bad), but I would like to fix this right.
The continuity of the ground from the music jack to my audio panel (GMA 340) tests fine, so my only other thought is to try running a jumper from the music ground (Garmin calls it the "music return") at the GMA connector to the GMA chassis and re-install the fiber isolation washers. This will be a fairly major undertaking, so I have not tried it yet. Anyone have any other suggestions?
Pat
My ongoing audio problem is the quality of my portable music. I could fiddle with connections in the air and sometimes get good quality sound, but most of the time the music was weak and distorted (all of the other audio sounds great). I have spent hours insuring continuity and changing connectors, but nothing helped. I even tried different ipods in hope that the first one had some type of connection problem.
Today I was sitting in the airplane again fiddling with the connections, and accidentally discovered that if I held the ipod while making good contact myself on a grounded part of the airframe, the sound quality was great! I pulled the fiber isolation washers out of the music jack so that the jack makes contact with the airframe, and the quality of the music is better over the airplane headset than it is with ear-buds that came with the ipod. Unfortunately, a test flight shows that I do get alternator noise now, and I never did before. Right now I would rather have good music quality than eliminate the noise (it is not that bad), but I would like to fix this right.
The continuity of the ground from the music jack to my audio panel (GMA 340) tests fine, so my only other thought is to try running a jumper from the music ground (Garmin calls it the "music return") at the GMA connector to the GMA chassis and re-install the fiber isolation washers. This will be a fairly major undertaking, so I have not tried it yet. Anyone have any other suggestions?
Pat
