Quick 1/8 stereo jack question

[thejapino]

Here's a random one for the audiophiles. I'm hacking my Xbox 360 headset and I need to know one thing.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/316Y1TMX43L._SL500_AA280_.jpg
I cut open an 1/8 stereo jack and found 3 wires:
-red
-black
-unshielded copper

I know there is supposed to be:
-L. signal
-R. signal
-ground

I know the red wire is the right signal but I'm confused as to which one is the ground/left. Which is the ground? Unshielded or black?

Car electrical instinct tells me black is ground. Someone else told me unshielded should be ground but he wasn't sure. Help anybody???

[tgd89]

Unshielded should be ground, with left being black. A quick test would be to plug it into something, if you can, and test if the black line sees any voltage.

[thejapino]

Thanks, I checked it with a continuity tester at work and funny thing is, left was red and black was right. Unshielded was ground.

[vin diesel]

its not left and right audio. its mic, mono speaker, ground. you only have one speaker. what are you trying to do. i think its black-speaker. red-mic. then other one is ground.

[thejapino]

No, this cable is right speaker, left speaker and ground. Its just a standard 1/8 stereo cable. The Xbox 360 headset is speaker, speaker ground, mic, mic ground.

I was trying to splice some cables together between the Xbox headset and the 1/8 headphone output from the TV so I could listen to the game sound + the chat from using Xbox live while chatting using the xbox mic, just like those turtle beach headsets.

The problem I found was once you spliced the mono out signal from the xbox headset into your regular headphones left or right, the volume went down on whatever side you spliced into. I guess once that right side speaker had to take 2 inputs, it would only output half of the volume for each one. I also tried to split the xbox live mono signal into both left AND right of the headphones but that resulted in making your nice stereo headphones into nice mono headphones. No way to tell which side the footsteps are coming from during search and destroy! :duh: