External microphone for the Nokia N95 & a bonus custom cable

Ok – so hooking an external microphone up to the Nokia N95 is not an original idea – but most of the solutions we found on the web involved some pretty delicate cable connections and adapters:

External Microphone for The N95: The Final Word (we hope) & video tutorial
Steve Garfield – video

I blogged about our solution a few months back – and then lost that post in a blog crash. Don Himsel has also covered our set-up on Newsvideographer.com.

We have received a few emails about it in the past few weeks – so here it is again:

The bracket is the Nokia DT-22 which works just fine. We are using a Senheiser shotgun mic in this particular set, but obviously it works with anything that has a stereo mini-plug. It is particularly fun using a wireless mic with the N95.

So – the key here is the custom mic cable we soldered together for the purpose. The N95 has a standard AV 4-conductor 3.5mm jack in the bottom. And despite the inclusion of a proprietary cable with the camera, any cable will work. Nokia has changed the ‘colors’ on the cable – yellow is NOT the video signal – so just keep that in mind.

The cable we built is painfully simple. We took a standard AV cable (4 conductor plug on one end – 3 RCA plugs at the other end.)

After figuring out which of the 3 RCA cables were carrying which signal – we cut off the RCA plugs, trimmed the cable down the the desired length and soldered the audio left and right cables onto a standard (3 conductor) stereo modular jack. The ‘extra’ cable is simply left inside the plug housing – it is not connected to anything. (And FYI – links are for illustrative purposes – we bought our parts at the local Radio Shack.)

I can not remember which cables were left/right audio – but there are only three to choose from so it was not tough to figure out. When using the cable – plug the mic in first – then plug the cable into the Nokia. When prompted, select ‘headset’ as the accessory to be used.

Good luck.