On Mon 23-Mar-2009 13:34, Don Pearce wrote:
On Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:09:41 -0000, "Serge Auckland"
wrote:
One great confusion is the meaning of the terms "plug" and
"socket". As far as I'm concerned a plug goes on a cable, and
a socket goes on a panel. You therefore can have male plugs or
female plugs, and the same for sockets.
Therefore your adapter above is an RCA female to 3.5mm jack
male. You don't and shouldn't mention the words plug or
socket.
S.
Never. A plug is male and a socket is female. Another word for
a socket is a jack. It doesn't matter what they are attached
to, and nor should it - that is entirely beside the point
(missing the business end, if you like).
In RF, of course, there are hermaphrodite connectors, like the
7mm.
You say "Another word for a socket is a jack".
I think that is only US usage. Not for the UK.
The Wiki entry for a TRS Connector explains:
"In the UK, the terms jack plug and jack socket
are commonly used for the respectively male and
female TRS connectors.
In the U.S., a female connector is called a jack."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS_connector
However even once we straighten out the right term for the gender
of a connector that still doesn't really answer the OP's query.
If we leave aside ambiguous words like "jack", he seems to be
asking whether it's the socket or the plug that come first in a
description of an adaptor/gender changer which says: "X to Y".
Is X the socket and Y the plug?