Years ago, from time to time, I needed to use an attenuating patch cord to dub the sound from an audio source to a tape recorder. It was about three feet long, black, with a mini-plug on each end. It would transfer the audio signal from the earphone jack of a tape player to the microphone jack of a tape recorder, lessening the strength of the audio along the way so as not to overpower the microphone level.
Now I have dozens of old cassette tapes with interviews, radio broadcasts and other memorable stuff, and I need to take those analog signals and transfer them into the computer. Well, after looking for my 30 year old attenuating patch cord which I bought at Radio Shack for a buck or two, I couldn't find it, so I thought I would just order one off the internet.
Man, am I getting old. Searching for an attenuating patch cord brought in lots of results, but nothing that even resembled what I used to know one as. Half of the search results were for things that I had never heard of, the other half was for professional audio processing, costing ten times more than I wanted to (or expected to) pay for one. There were even optical attenuating patch cables. I tried to imagine what that would be for, but I gave up.
But I did get a laugh out of one webpage that defined the function of an attenuating patch cord as a cable that "attenuates" a signal only in one direction, down. It does not attenuate the sound level upward. Well, duh.
