Wouldn’t it be great if all pinball machines had an ‘audio out’ feature so you could connect your headphones or if you wanted to capture the audio for streaming? Well there’s a few dedicated audio board options that you can purchase to achieve this but I got to thinking of a way to do it on the cheap or using off the shelf parts.
What does every pinball machine have in common? Well they all have speakers in the backbox and cabinet so I want to tap into the output to those and convert it into ‘line level output’.
I did a quick search on Amazon for ‘Line Output Converter – Hi to Low Level Adapter’ and found lots of devices that claim to do exactly what I needed. It looks like these are used for car audio where people want to add amplifiers and sub woofers but I thought I’d see if it’d work on a pinball game.
This is the one I went with:
I had some .100″ connectors and pins in my spares stock for replacing IDC connectors and some speaker wire so I set about soldering the cable to the converter and pinning the plugs to the end that connects to the pinball machine.
So the cable took me about half hour to make and it works great! Not bad for £7, a couple of plugs and some spare wires.
You can then connect up an RCA to male or female 2.5mm jack either for connecting to a PC, audio interface or for connecting headphones.
I also made up a converter cable to plug this into a Stern Sam game (Tron Legacy) which I’ll photograph at some point.
Hope this article was useful for someone, if so, please drop me a comment and let us know how you got on!