Piping music / movie to every headset

Daven

Daven

Pre-Flight
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Oct 15, 2020
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Awesometastic1
My plane ('77 turbo arrow III) has a little male headphone jack wired in for piping music or whatever to every headset, but it's never worked despite the previous owner swearing it always did for him. Mechanic took a look at the last annual and couldn't see why not and so quoted about $500-$750 to rig something up instead but wasn't too enthused about it. :)

So anyway, just wondering if anyone knows any good alternate way to accomplish the same thing? Every headset in the plane does have Bluetooth if there is some adapter of some sort that allows multiple connections to it. Or other solution?
 
Which audio panel do you have?
 
Nothing fancy- Narco cp 136 tso.
 
Ok: what intercom system do you have?
 
Flightcom 403 or something like that, and Garmin 530 and 430 all hooked up. Again nothing fancy. Four dual plug hookups and also up front two of the I think it's 6? pin powered plugs, though I've never used those. Also up front is this random male standard headphone jack line for hooking up to media players, but, again, it never seems to work. Former owner swears it does, and first time I tried it was days after buying the plane a couple years ago. He said nothing special to get it to work. Just plug it in. My mechanic couldn't get it to work either so I'm assuming I'm not just being stupid. ;-)

I did just find on Amazon a Bluetooth transmitter for about $30 that says it can hook up to two headsets at the same time for audio out. So that's an improvement. But so far none that can do all four headsets at the same time. And none that can keep the ability to talk on the phone through the headsets. But I rarely do that anyway.
 
The 403 has no provision for music input, and (of course) neither does the CP136 Narco (although you do have an unswitched audio input on P101, pin 6, which could send music kinda half-assed in mono, but I bet that ain’t the plan…).

So, maybe there’s some sort of roll-your-own solution going on?

You could put in a PS Engineering intercom, which has music input designed-in, in place of the Flightcom. Just some repinning, not too tough. I might even have one rattling around in my “stuff I was gonna use but didn’t” stores at the hangar, with which I could be persuaded to part for… pretty much nothing.
 
SCCutler said:
Well, I’m a big liar; the 403 does have music input capability.
Click to expand...

That's helpful. Seems pretty straightforward just to check if that existing headphone jack is wired in to the pin 18 correctly and check it with a multimeter to make sure nothing wrong with the wire itself. From there the only possibility if all that's good is being an idiot somehow. ;-) Although given the number of other oddities from the previous owner like taxi lights on the wing tips he had custom installed but then nobody bothered to ever run wires in the wings to actually, you know, provide them power, wouldn't surprise me if it never actually got wired up. :)

Whatever the case, not sure why my mechanic quoted such a high number. :) He did sound like he was swamped and didn't want to mess with it... So maybe just got that "I don't want to do it" price. ;-) Here's hoping. :)
 
Are you REALLY sure you want piping music in your plane?

 
I have a PS Engineering PM-2000 Intercom that I will sell. It comes with a wiring harness for a four place plane but can be expanded for a six-place plane and has stereo. It can be mounted horizontally or vertical. It has an audio input. I have a guide that I made for mounting an Onyz Plus or Tour 360 XM receiver under your throttle quadrant.
 
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