Roland Drum Kit Only Playing Through One Headphone: Use the Phones Socket

A client’s Roland TD-series electronic drum kit was only playing through one side of their headphones, and the headphones turned out to be plugged into one of the kit’s line outputs instead of the headphone socket.

The client asked me why their Roland TD-series kit was only coming through one headphone, and why it sounded so odd. They wanted to know whether the drum kit was broken or whether it was the headphones.

Neither of them was broken. What had happened was that the headphones were plugged into the line output on the kit’s module rather than the headphones output.

If you look at the sockets on the drum kit’s brain, there are several that are the same size and take the same plug, so it’s easy to pick the wrong one. They aren’t labelled the same, though. These are the labels to look for:

The one you want is labelled Phones or Headphones, or has a headphones icon next to it.
The ones you don’t want are the outputs, labelled Output or marked for the right or left side.

If you’re only getting sound in one earphone, I’d say you’ve probably plugged into a line out rather than the phones out.

So the fix was changing sockets on the kit itself.

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