audio connectors
Paul Graves-Brown
Abstract
Electrical and electronic connectors are an archetypal example of Machine Age artefacts. In this article I focus on
two such connectors, the jack plug and DIN plug, which have played a key role in the history of music
technology. Their development, and that of cognate technologies, serves as a graphic illustration of the processes
of standardization and miniaturization that have shaped the material culture of the contemporary world.
Keywords
Standardization; miniaturization; music technology; connector; style; function.
Introduction
Temporarily relocating my home recording studio, I found myself sorting through a mass of tangled
cables and leads, some of which I have owned for more than thirty years. This started me thinking
again about the huge variety of connectors electronic, electrical and otherwise that pervade our
society. Some persist over long periods; others, such as the SCART video connector, have a much
shorter vogue, but in one way or another they all contribute to the story of the Machine Age (or
ages), of the development of technology, mass production and, most obviously, the role of
standardization (Banham 1960; Besen and Farrell 1994; Cusumano, Mylonadis, and Rosenbloom
1992; Myers 2010; Schroeder 1986). In fact I would hazard that the connector or plug is an
archetype of mechanical reproduction; connectors, above all, require standards, that A, for example,
should always t with B, in order to function,. It is no accident that the very term connector is rst
used in 1795 in the early years of the Industrial Revolution. Ever since Samuel Colt displayed his
revolvers at the Great Exhibition of 1851, the progress of a technological society has depended on
the interchangeability of parts (Rolt 1965; Woodbury 1973), and at times, in a capitalist society, this
has led to prolonged battles between competing standards (see, e.g., Besen and Farrell 1994;
Cusumano, Mylonadis, and Rosenbloom 1992).
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Connectors, as we shall see, are as much the product of isochrestic variation as any other
material culture (Lemonnier 1991, 2012; Sackett 1982). However, there is what Lemonnier
(1991), following Leroi-Gourhan, calls a tendance in the fact that most, if not all, adopt the
trope of male and female where, for practical reasons, a projection or projections is/are inserted
into a corresponding socket. Indeed, technically this is often termed mating one with another
(but the broader psycho-social implications of this trope are beyond the scope of this article).
Moreover, connectors are almost invariably intended to be manipulated by the human hand and
hence the affordances (sensu Gibson 1979) that they offer must reect this aspect of the human
scale (Pirsig 1974). Such affordances constitute what Gibson called invariance: an embodied
xity around which cultural variation revolves and which, as I shall discuss later, may explain the
constraints that have shaped the development of connectors in our era of miniaturization.
In this article I shall discuss two of the most important connectors in the history of music
technology: the -inch jack plug (aka phone plug or TRS jack) and the DIN plug (Fig. 1), albeit
neither had its origins in a musical context. Although other technologies, such as the XLR or the RCA
Phono will be mentioned, these two stand out in the gradual electrication of sound over the last
century. Moreover, they illustrate quite different trajectories in the process of invention, which is
hardly ever as simple as we tend to think (Winston 1986). I begin, at the beginning, with the jack plug.
Jack plug
Unless you are a musician or a sound engineer, you will be most familiar with the more recent
3.5mm variant of what is probably the oldest type of audio connector still in use. These are more
or less ubiquitous as plugs for headphones, etc., on laptops, MP3 players and smart phones. The
3.5mm plug is a true TRS in that it has three points of connection: tip, ring and sleeve. On the
iPod this carries the stereo signal on tip and ring with the sleeve being common to both. But we
should note that jack plugs began with only tip and sleeve, such as the standard used for electric
guitars and other musical instruments (Fig. 5 below). The jack is almost always used as an audio
connector, although on occasion it is deployed to carry control signals: in the form of foot
switches and pedals for guitars and ampliers and as patch cables on modular synthesizers such
as those produced by Robert Moog in the 1960s (Pinch 2004).
The etymology of jack is not at all clear, the most popular account being that early variants
resembled a jack knife, which is to a certain extent true (see Fig. 2). As with most inventions, the
origin of the plug is shrouded in the mysteries of claim and counter-claim. What is certain is that its
origin lies in telegraphy and the transition to telephony in the United States in the 1870s and 80s.
Here it should be noted that, when telephony crossed the Atlantic and eventually became, in the UK,
the remit of the General Post Ofce, a different standard of plug was adopted: the Post Ofce jack or
PO jack. This has the same basic form, with tip, ring and sleeve, but different dimensions (Fig. 1).
During my sojourn with the BBC (see Graves-Brown 2013a) the PO jack was the standard, as it still
is in many recording studios. In the control room where I worked there were numerous bays of 19inch racks with endless rows of PO jack sockets (c. 15,000), some of which had had the same leads
connected to them for years (Fig. 3; see also Beckwith 2013).
The rst thing to bear in mind with the origin of the jack plug is that early telephones, like
telegraph before them, used a single wire to carry the signal, the circuit or return being
completed by an earth connection. The earliest plugs, then, had to connect a single wire.
Figure 1 a) jack Western Electric catalogue 1908; b) 3.5mm TRS jack and RCA Phono; c) Regency
TR-1 earphone jack; d) Post Ofce jack; e) ve-pin DIN, mini DIN and male Cannon XLR; f) comparison,
DIN and XLR pin assemblies; g) Tuchel connector drawn from Sennheiser MD421-2; h) Standard, mini
and micro USB.
While this system had been entirely adequate for the essentially binary telegraph signal, it soon
proved too prone to noise and electromagnetic interference to be suitable for sound, and in 1881
Alexander Graham Bell patented a two-wire twisted pair cable which became the standard for
telephony (US Patent No. 244426). The jack plug has its origins in switchboards, the simplest of
which were pegboards or button switches, used in telegraph stations to connect local apparatus
to the (single) line. The plugs or pegs were simple brass rods with a handle, inserted into a
Plugging in 451
Figure 3 The main jackeld in the control room, BBC Broadcasting House, London, late 1970s. This part
of the building no longer exists since the post-2006 redevelopment (image courtesy of Phil Hughes).
shaped slot between two contacts. The rst telephone exchange is attributed to the Hungarian
engineer Tivadar Pusks, then (1878) working for Edison. A year later the rst public exchange
was built by George W. Hoy in New Haven, Connecticut (appropriate location), apparently a
rather Heath Robinson affair constructed from odds and ends (Deland 1907). However this was
soon rened with the aid of a Mr Snell, whose switchboard jacks do hint at the knife origin for
the term. But here it seems, from the illustrations, that connections were made by turning the
jack such that the knife guard element connected the two adjacent terminals (Fig. 2).
Around the same time, one George F. Durand of St. Louis used what was described as a
jump jack switchboard, but perhaps most signicantly Thomas B. Doolittle of Boston also
developed a switchboard which appears to have used plugs and cables to make the connections
(Deland 1907). Here the cables were counterweighted to draw them back into the board to avoid
Plugging in 453
Figure 5 Extract from US Patent application No. 2089171: jack connection for George Beachamps 1931
design for the frying pan guitar.
the jack plug, such as that of Milo G. Kellogg, (US Patent No.385863, 1888) and Charles E.
Scribner (US Patent No.293198, 1884), both appear to be intended for use with a single wire, at
a time when Bell had already introduced the use of a twisted pair of wires. Illustrations from the
1908 Western Electric catalogue (Fig. 1) indicate that at this stage the jack had only a tip and
sleeve. I imagine that the ring was introduced only when circuits were either balanced or carried
a stereo signal.1
From this point, the jack then became a standard which other technologies could appropriate.
Thus, George Beachamps 1931 design for the frying pan guitar (US Patent No.2089171, Fig. 5),
the rst truly electric guitar, includes a mono (i.e. tip and sleeve) double-ended jack lead to connect
the instrument to an amplier. This instrument was a lap steel guitar aimed at the growing fashion for
Hawaiian music in the 1930s. Made of solid aluminium, it was eventually marketed as the
Rickenbacker Electro A-22 from 1932 to 1939. This jack-to-jack conguration is found on just
about every electric guitar to this day. Around the same time, the Radio Corporation of America
(RCA), which had purchased the Victor Talking Machine Company (the largest manufacturer of
phonographs) in 1929, started to manufacture what has become known as the Phono plug, not to be
confused with phone plug which is often an alternative appellation for the jack. Initially the Phono
served a similar purpose to the guitar jack lead, connecting phonographs (hence Phono) to the
ampliers of valve radios.
Size will be a recurrent theme of this paper, and hence it is no surprise that in the 1950s we
begin to see the emergence of mini jacks, usually of approximately inch, i.e. half the diameter
of the standard jack. I assume that the 3.5mm jack in use today is a metrication of this standard.
Miniaturization of plugs comes with the general pattern of reduction in scale (see Edgeworth
2013) of products that accompanied the invention of the transistor, developed by William
Shockley and colleagues at Bell Labs in 1947 (for which they received the 1956 Nobel Prize
for Physics).2 By the mid-1950s, companies such as Raytheon and particularly Texas
Instruments were mass producing transistors and already in 1953 these found their way into
the rst transistor hearing aid, the Maico Model O (Transist-Ear, see Bauman 2013). Indeed,
hearing aids, with their requirement for discretion and portability, can be seen as a principal
driver of miniaturization (Mills 2011). In the following year a joint enterprise between Texas
DIN plug
The DIN plug or DIN connector is another familiar item among my collection of cables,
generally in the ve-pin version, although there have been numerous others from three to
nine pins in various congurations. I think my rst encounter with these was when, sometime
in 19712, my Dad brought home our rst cassette recorder, a Philips EL3302 (their rst ever
machine being the 3300 released in 1964). This mono recorder had three- and ve-pin sockets
on the side, which were initially used to connect a microphone incorporating a remote switch to
stop and start recording. This reects the fact that Philips conceived of the cassette as a kind of
dictation machine, a curious echo of the fact that Thomas Edison originally had similar ideas for
the phonograph or speaking machine (US Patent 200521, 1878).
I should say that at this time these connectors were not a DIN standard. In the service manual
for the EL3302 (in Dutch) the sockets are simply labelled BD1, BD2, and the associated plugs
described as Steker 3-polig and Steker 5-polig. The standard for three- and ve-pin plugs
was established in 1974 as DIN 41524:197403, and [a]t this time it needed about 15 years
from starting the work till the publication was issued (Rainer Difipp, personal communication,
21 October 2013). In comparison, the rst Sony cassette machine, the TC-110 of 1971, has mini
jack socket connections (see above) as did many other devices at the time. Yet by the mid1970s, DIN connectors were becoming the standard, at least in Europe, for the interconnection/
connection of audio devices with, in particular, the ve-pin connectors being a standard for
stereo audio.
As for the jack plug, so the exact origin of the DIN plug remains obscure: the Deutsches
Institut fur Normung has disposed of all of its records more than ten years old (Rainer Difipp,
personal communication, 21 October 2013). It seems probable that it originated around 1959
60, since it rst appears at this time on radio equipment and microphones. Yet, like the jack, it
had several predecessors. Cannon Electric Co. had been founded in 1915 by James H. Cannon,
initially manufacturing electrical power connectors (ITT Cannon n.d.; cf. Schroeder 1986).
However, in the late 1920s Cannon began to concentrate on producing connectors for the
emerging talkies in the movie industry, producing its P series (P for Paramount) for studio
microphones. The rst X series was introduced in the 1930s, a miniature connector in
comparison to its predecessors, followed by the XL and XLR series in the 1940s. The L and
R refer respectively to the incorporation of a latch to hold the connector in place and the
production of a more resilient connector that used polychloroprene (neoprene) in the female
connector. Later versions were, strictly speaking, the XLP (using plastic instead of neoprene)
although the XLR name has stuck. Indeed, in terms of second-order signication (Barthes
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[1957] 1993), it is notable that: a) when I rst encountered these connectors in the late 1970s
they were always known as Cannons (as in Biro or Hoover); and b) although most have
subsequently been manufactured by companies such as Neutrik and Switchcraft, their designs
are actually based on the XL, rather than the XLR (Fig. 1).
Certainly, if we compare the design of the DIN plug and XLR they are very similar, with the
pins of the male connector in a circular arc contained within a tubular metal screen or skirt
(Fig. 1). The obvious difference is that XLRs were cast metal and the DIN of plastic, with a
imsier pressed metal screen and wire pins. However, there is a second origin candidate in the
Tuchelstecker (Fig. 1). Invented by Tuchel GmbH in 1936, this connector resembles the DIN
plug except that it is larger (19mm diameter as opposed to 13.2mm) and has rectangular rather
than round pins arranged in a Y formation. These were intended to mate with high-pressure
connectors in the socket, making them self-cleaning. By 1943 the Tuchel connector had become
the standard in German broadcasting. Around 195960 there was a transitional phase in the use
of connectors, as is well illustrated by Sennheisers iconic MD421 microphone of 1960. Still
made to this day, the MD421 can be found in three variants: the MD421-N (3-pin DIN), the
MD421-2 (Tuchel connector) and MD421-U (XLR). More recently manufactured examples are
all of the latter type.
Origins
The present Deutsches Institut fr Normung has its origins in 1917, when the Imperial government set up the Kniglichen Fabrikationsbro fr Artillerie which soon became
Normalienauschu fr den Maschinenbau and ultimately Normenausschu der deutschen
Industrie. The standards that it published were Deutschen Industrie-Normen (abbreviated to
DIN). Given the date, the context is obvious, but the origin of the desire for standardization in
German industry goes back to 1907 and the gure of Herman Muthusius, who founded the
Deutsche Werkbund. Together with Peter Behrens, Muthusiuss ideas were to inuence generations of architects and designers, including Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius and Le
Corbusier. Initially a follower of the Arts and Crafts Movement, Muthusius (a Prussian civil
servant) stressed the importance of uniformity over individualism (Banham 1960) and this is
what DIN came to represent, both practically and stylistically, as can be seen in the work of the
Bauhaus and the Functionalist designs of the post-Second World War era (Dormer 1993).
The early decades of the twentieth century were the time for standards. According to the
British Standards Institute website (BSI 2013): Sir John Wolfe-Barry the man who designed
Londons Tower Bridge instigated the Council of the Institution of Civil Engineers to form a
committee to consider standardizing iron and steel sections on 22 January 1901.4 Similarly:
In 1916, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (now IEEE) invited the American
Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE),
the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers (AIME) and the American
Society for Testing Materials (now ASTM International) to join in establishing an impartial
national body to coordinate standards development, approve national consensus standards,
and halt user confusion on acceptability.
(ANSI 2013)
Plugging in 457
Figure 6 My studio, c. 1987. Top left Roland TR808 with DIN sync 24. Bottom Cheetah MK5 MIDI
controller keyboard. Bottom right Canon MSX computer with Yamaha SFG05 synthesizer (DIN MIDI in
and out). Somewhere just out of shot is an old Philips EL3320, which I used as a data recorder for the
computer (DIN connections). All other instruments were connected by jacks.
century, the principal driver for precision and miniaturization lay in clock- and watchmaking,
yet from the time of Boulton and Watt onward it became apparent that even large machines
required a degree of precision in order to function efciently (Rolt 1965).
Even before the rst standards organizations began, Joseph Whitworth had developed
standard screw threads in the UK (which are still in use) and the US motor industry had
begun to negotiate standards, which is hardly surprising given that the internal combustion
engine required unprecedented levels of precision (Rolt 1965). To have workable standards you
must have precision, and having precision implies working on smaller and smaller scales.
Although the drive for miniaturization is generally seen as a phenomenon of the post-Second
World War period, and particularly that period since the formulation of Moores Law (1965),5
the advantages of more compact and hence more personal and portable devices are ubiquitous to
material culture (e.g. the internal combustion engine is a more portable alternative to the steam
engine, especially in aviation). Improvements in machining precision at the beginning of the
twentieth century led to a general development of more compact devices throughout the century,
be this in terms of hearing aids, radios or weapons.
The history of connectors largely follows this pattern of precision and miniaturization, from
jack to mini jack, DIN to mini DIN, Cannon P-series to the XLR. In the case of the DIN plug, it
is now being superseded by USB (Fig. 1). This, unlike the jack or DIN, was an agreed standard
developed in 1994 by seven companies led by Intel (Wikipedia 2013). And, indeed, USB has
itself undergone a process of miniaturization with the mini USB connector introduced with USB
2.0 (2001), which itself is now being superseded by micro USB (since 2007). As the name
implies, Universal Serial Bus aims at a more or less universal connectivity, but notably its
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Neil Bauman, Rainer Difipp (Deutsche Kommission Elektrotechnik), Adrian Myers
and Steven E. Reyer for their assistance. Thanks also to Andy Bantock, Tom Cullis, Carolyn
Graves-Brown, Mike Schiffer and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on the text.
Thanks to Phil Hughes, via Roger Beckwith, for his permission to use the image of BH Control
Room, Steven E. Reyer for the image of the TR-1 headphone jack and Andy Bantock for the
image of the PO jack.
Paul Graves-Brown
Honorary Senior Research Associate, Institute of Archaeology, UCL
p.graves-brown@ucl.ac.uk
Notes
1 A balanced connection, as used in broadcast and recording studios, uses the tip and ring for
signal and the sleeve connected to a screening mesh which is earthed. The tip and ring wires
are connected at each end to a 1:1 transformer or rep coil which cancels out any interference
along the cable.
2 Although it should be noted that the miniaturization of hearing aids and radios had begun
well before this with the development of miniature and sub-miniature thermionic valves from
the late 1930s onward.
3 A break jack is distinguished from a listen jack. In the former case, as in the TR-1, inserting
the jack breaks the signal connection to the speaker.
4 This is not strictly true Wolfe Barry designed the neo-Gothic exterior of Tower Bridge; its
steel skeleton was the work of Horace Jones, the architect to the City of London.
5 Moores law is the observation that, over the history of computing hardware, the number of
transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years.
6 No doubt some people also have an affection for particular cables, but in my experience,
unlike the case of guitars, standardised leads are impersonal and disposable.
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Paul Graves-Brown studied prehistory for his PhD but switched to the study of modern
material culture in the mid-1990s. Before becoming an archaeologist he worked as an engineer
in BBC radio, and has performed and composed electronic music since the late 1970s. Principal
publications include Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture (Routledge 2000) and The Oxford
Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World (with Rodney Harrison and Angela
Piccini, Oxford University Press, 2013).
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