I was looking at the iRig Pre and realized it would be very easy to use the built in headphone jack as a standard output which would mean no hacked cable or extra parts would be required. If you remove the battery cover and battery, you’ll notice a small screw between the positive and negative terminals. Removing this screw allows you to take the iRig Pre apart to get to the internal wiring.

The headphone jack on the iRig Pre is passive so it’s really just a set of wires going out to the iphone plug, which means you only need to disconnect a few wires and hook them to the microphone output to get things working correctly. Once you have the cover off, you’ll see the wires you need to focus on and next to that the headphone output jack. Depending on how you plan to make the connections you might want to remove the 3 small screws that hold the electronics board to the case.

Once you’ve removed the 3 screws from the board, you’ll see the 3 terminals that you’ll need to connect together. The microphone output wire is the yellow arrow (yellow wire) and the left and right channel of the headphone jack is the red and black arrows (red and black wires). When I used an ohm meter on the iOS to PC adapter cable I realized that the left and right channel stereo outputs for the mic are tied together which makes this little hack even easier.

Basically this is a drawing of the back of the PCB board with wire colors and connections. All you need to do to convert the headphone jack to an audio output is cut the cable and connect the red, black, and yellow wires together. There are two black wires so make sure you have the one that’s connected to the correct point on the PCB board. The green wire and ground pin is already tied together on the board so you shouldn’t need to do anything with those wires. You can either remove the red, black ,and yellow wires and solder in a set of jumpers or solder the wires together and put a peace of tape on them to keep them from shorting to to something in the case either way will work. I just figured out the wiring diagram and i’ll post a how to video once I have a chance to do some soldering. But the basic hack is pretty easy and turns the iRig Pre into a very decent little pre-amp with audio gain.

I have a Neutrik Combo 3-Pin Female XLR / 1/4 Inch Stereo plug coming sometime this week that would also allow for multiple input options.  I’m not 100% sure if that will fit in this form factor but if it does the iRig Pre will be perfect for all kinds of applications. I’ll keep you posted.

After the hack update here.



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