3.5mm Aux Cable 10 Metre - Male to Male Stereo Audio Lead, Screened

Product Overview

A 10 metre stereo audio lead with an ordinary 3.5 mm jack plug on each end. Both ends are male, so it runs between two sockets — a headphone output at one end into a line input at the other. It is the same connector found on phones, laptops, portable speakers and the AUX socket on a car or home stereo, just far longer than the lead usually supplied with them.

The whole point of it is reach. The lead in the box with a set of powered speakers is usually about a metre and a half, which is fine on a desk and useless anywhere else. Ten metres covers a television on one wall to an amplifier in a cabinet on the other, a laptop at the dining table to a hi-fi in the corner, or a projector at the back of a room to speakers at the front. It is also long enough to run around the skirting board instead of straight across the floor, which is usually the difference between a lead that stays where you put it and one that gets kicked out mid-song.

The cable is screened. The two signal cores run inside a braided shield that is bonded to the sleeve of each plug. Over a run this long that shield is doing real work: an unscreened lead lying alongside a mains flex or a plugpack for ten metres will pick up hum, and on a quiet passage you will hear it. Each plug has a moulded collar where the cable enters, so the flex bends over a curve rather than folding at the solder joint — which is where a long lead otherwise gives out first.

It is completely passive: no amplifier, no battery, no switch, nothing to set up, and it works in either direction. That also means it cannot make a quiet source louder. Across ten metres there is a small loss of level and of the very top treble, which is normal for any long analogue run and is rarely audible on speakers — but if you are feeding a very low-output source into a very insensitive input, a shorter lead or a powered input will do better.

Check the ends before ordering, because the near-identical variants exist. This one is male to male: a plug at each end, both straight. If what you actually want is to make an existing lead longer, you need an extension instead, which has a plug at one end and a socket at the other. If the socket you are plugging into sits hard against a wall or a bench, a right-angled version turns the plug through ninety degrees so it clears. All three use the same 3.5 mm connector and look alike in a thumbnail, so it is worth a moment on the close-up pictures — the second and third images show each plug on its own.

It suits anything with a 3.5 mm analogue audio socket: laptops and desktop PCs, phones and tablets that still have a headphone socket, portable and powered speakers, soundbars, car AUX inputs, projectors, mixing desks via a suitable adaptor, and the headphone output on a television or monitor. It is an analogue lead only — it does not carry optical or digital audio, and being three-pole it does not pass a microphone channel.

This listing is for one 10 metre lead. Multi-buy pricing is shown above if you need more than one — two rooms, or a spare to leave permanently behind a cabinet.

Specifications