This struck me as I was looking for my cables and adapters to plug my bass into my laptop. As I was heading past Playstation stuff, in my crawl space, I found a broken PS2 head set. I looked at and got intrigued.
In the following tutorial I will show how to make a PS2 headset interface act as a mono input and output sound card on your computer.
What you need:
- PS2 Headset (Cable must be in tacked passed the volume control)
- Wire strippers (or Knife)
- Soldering Iron
- Solder
- 1/4″ Mono Male
- 1/8″ Mono (or Stereo) Female
- Electrical Tape
To start off, cut the cable on the headset closest to the top. Then strip the wire with your wire stripes.
There should be a red, ground, and a black wire. Now the black wire has two more wires inside. Start by stripping that. The Red and Ground are the output of the box. We will deal with these one’s first.
The Red is the audio output and you will want to strip the insulation about 1/2″ down. Then take the 1/8″ Mono (or Stereo) Female end and solder the Red to where the tip of the head phone jack is. Then take the ground wire and solder it to the ground terminal. Its usually the biggest and comes out of the side of the plug.
Once that is complete you will now want to strip the black wire. Now there is a white and another ground. Take the 1/4″ Mono Male and solder it up just like the other one. Should look something like this. White to tip and ground to the outside shield.
Next, you might want to get a peace of something that’s non-conductive to support the two jacks together and wrap them with electrical tape or something else non-conductive.
Plug it in to a USB port and see if it works. I tested it with Guitar Rig 2 by Native Instruments and my guitar.
First thing you want to do is plug your headphones into the 1/8″ plug. Then plug the 1/4″ end into you Guitar or Bass.
In Guitar Rig 2 you can set the audio devise for input and output. I recommend using the headset for Input and Output because it has less latency then most on-board sound cards. Using the headset only gets you Mono, so if you want Stereo then use sound card as you output devise.
This is very hand for someone playing or wanting to practice on the road. Takes two seconds to hook up and can also be used in other applications.