playthatbeat
Student
I run an amp for my arcade boards' sound, feeding a Sub and 2 6x9 2 ways. The amp is fed from a small 12 channel mixer. I have 6 boards on a switcher in one cabinet. Some boards have LINE level audio out, so there are no problems.
Some require a pad to reduce speaker level to LINE level. The F3 is one of these. The S header is a direct output to speakers, not line level, so, not wanting to blow the crap out of the channel, i made a pad for each leg and connected it into my mixer. Games would boot fine, but as soon as the sound started, it would crash and go into a boot loop.
Frustrated, I resorted to tapping the Jamma sound (mono) from the jamma extender, which is also speaker level, padding it, and using that. I found the problem was reduced, the sound would work fine, but games would crash when the audio level went up (like a big explosion) during a game!
The solution was to lift the - of the speaker feed from the input to the mixer after the pad circuit. I can only assume the audio GND from the F3 is connected to the Jamma GND anyway, and a spike in audio level would cause chaos, and a crash. So, now i have Line level audio, from the jamma out of the F3, but after padding it to line level, i'm only connecting the + to the mixer Line IN - all i did was snip the - inside the jack that plugs into the mixer.
I have not had to do this with the other games i padded the speaker output from, they all connect to the mixer without issues thru the same basic circuit (below), so there is something different going on with the F3 audio outs. Still running it in MONO, i'll try the S header for stereo/2 channel again some other time..
Some require a pad to reduce speaker level to LINE level. The F3 is one of these. The S header is a direct output to speakers, not line level, so, not wanting to blow the crap out of the channel, i made a pad for each leg and connected it into my mixer. Games would boot fine, but as soon as the sound started, it would crash and go into a boot loop.
Frustrated, I resorted to tapping the Jamma sound (mono) from the jamma extender, which is also speaker level, padding it, and using that. I found the problem was reduced, the sound would work fine, but games would crash when the audio level went up (like a big explosion) during a game!
The solution was to lift the - of the speaker feed from the input to the mixer after the pad circuit. I can only assume the audio GND from the F3 is connected to the Jamma GND anyway, and a spike in audio level would cause chaos, and a crash. So, now i have Line level audio, from the jamma out of the F3, but after padding it to line level, i'm only connecting the + to the mixer Line IN - all i did was snip the - inside the jack that plugs into the mixer.
I have not had to do this with the other games i padded the speaker output from, they all connect to the mixer without issues thru the same basic circuit (below), so there is something different going on with the F3 audio outs. Still running it in MONO, i'll try the S header for stereo/2 channel again some other time..