Rear Audio Input To Kenwood TS-870

Feeding the audio to the back of Kenwood TS-870 is a great way to get rid of the bass rumble and high end splat when you run an outboard EQ and harmonics. Your lows will be tighter, the mids and highs are more clearly defined. The seperation between low, mid and high is better.
End result: More balanced and articulate audio.

Use the 13 din plug, choose pin 11 & 12 for your audio inputs. Pin 11 is Audio +, pin 12 is Audio -
You will also need to wire pin 8 and pin 9 for PTT. The reason for this is because the audio is seperate from the front mic input jack, so you need a seperate PTT to key the radio and to pass the audio directly into the First IF stage of the rig (these pinouts are on page 7 of your operating manual).

Now, to make life simple, if you were lucky enough or just happened to have the 13 DIN plug with color coded wires supplied with some Icom rigs such as the PRO II, PRO III for instance, that plug would play just fine and would save lots of grief when trying to solder the wire onto those tiny and close spaced pins.

The color codings are as follows:

  • Pin 12 is Light Blue

  • Pin 11 is Pink

  • Pin 9 is White

  • Pin 8 is Grey

    • If the other end of your cable is an XLR, then connect pin 11 to pin 2 of the XLR connector and pin 12 to pin 3 of the XLR. Also, solder the shield to this same pin.

    For those who want to have a direct audio output to your computer (recording, gragh work, etc...) the pinout is:

  • Pin 3 (Audio Out) is Orange

  • Pin 4 (Audio Ground) is Yellow

    • Another thing, you need to adjust MENU 20 to ZERO. You can play with the gain 0/1/2 but I found 0 to be the best setting (less noise).
    You also may need to set MENU 29 to ZERO and re-EQ your lows to compensate for the decrease in the bass frequency response via the rear DIN plug input.
    Lastly, if you need to adjust the "mic gain", the only way to do this is to adjust your audio rack's final output level (not to be confused with pre-amp mic gain). Your mic gain on the radio is un-effective with rear audio input.

    Hope this helps and I'm looking forward to hear some real "Voo-Doo" audio... None of that sissy stuff.

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