Training with headphones

[Hobster]

Ah, the wonders of syntactic ambiguity in the English language that can lead you down the garden path
Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

[tristof]

Hello,
That’s my first post to this nice forum since I purchased my new Nord Stage 4, so thank you already for all the help you guys are providing.
So I tested the solution provided above with a lightning too stereo jack 3.5mm adapter and a regular audio cable with 3.5mm jack at both end. Unfortunately, it feels like I cannot plug in the cable all the way in the monitor-in input of the piano and so the sound seems to be in mono and is very bad. Should the cable be mono and not stereo?
Thanks

[Elias]

Hello,
That’s my first post to this nice forum since I purchased my new Nord Stage 4, so thank you already for all the help you guys are providing.
So I tested the solution provided above with a lightning too stereo jack 3.5mm adapter and a regular audio cable with 3.5mm jack at both end. Unfortunately, it feels like I cannot plug in the cable all the way in the monitor-in input of the piano and so the sound seems to be in mono and is very bad. Should the cable be mono and not stereo?
Thanks

Hello. For some reason the monitor input related problems are super common on Nord instruments. The cable most definitely should be stereo (TRS) to get audio to both L and R channels. With a mono (TS) cable you would simply only get the L channel (because R is shorted to ground).

[tristof]

Thanks for confirming this. I kept playing with it and cannot figure out the problem:
- Listening to the piano only in my headphones or using an external amplifier works perfectly
- Listening to the monitor-in (and the piano sound) using an external amplifier seems to work fine as well
- But listening to the monitor-in (and the piano sound) in my headphones does not work at all (the piano sound fine but the music is very distorted). If I unplug the monitor-in jack half way and play with the cable, I sometimes get correct sound.
I ordered new headphones and cables, I will see if that fixes the issue.

[dansnord]

I bought and use this with the NS4, which is a million times more convenient than cabling to your phone:

[dmamfmgm]

Different manufacturers don't always produce exactly the same size jack for the 3.5mm size. I've heard some people argue strongly that the manufacturer made a 3.175mm (1/8") jack on purpose. I doubt that, and I would guess that because 3.5mm is smaller than 1/4", there's less room for manufacturing variations before the connection starts to fail.

I have the same issue tristof described here:

If I unplug the monitor-in jack half way and play with the cable, I sometimes get correct sound.

My solution was to stop using the monitor in jack on my Nord.

[maxpiano]

Thanks for confirming this. I kept playing with it and cannot figure out the problem:
- Listening to the piano only in my headphones or using an external amplifier works perfectly
- Listening to the monitor-in (and the piano sound) using an external amplifier seems to work fine as well
- But listening to the monitor-in (and the piano sound) in my headphones does not work at all (the piano sound fine but the music is very distorted). If I unplug the monitor-in jack half way and play with the cable, I sometimes get correct sound.
I ordered new headphones and cables, I will see if that fixes the issue.

The MonitorIN on the Nord Stage has no gain or volume controls, so you need to ensure you are not saturating it using the volume control of the source (and also that your lightning to stereo jack 3.5mm adapter is a quality one, better if Apple original or at least Apple certified).

I also use a 3.52 stereo minijack cable coming from my iPad Air2 headphone output sometimes and more often a Y cable (stereo minijack to 2x mono jacks) to connect various keyboards to my NS3 monitor IN (I just wrap the excess cable on one arm of the stand, to avoid it putting too much weight/strain on the NS connector), never had a problem once levels are properly set.