Transferring 8mm/mono to DV Cam then firewire

[ChadClancy]

I have a bunch of mono 8mm tapes from my old camcorder that I want to convert to DV through my Canon ZR70MC digital camcorder then passthrough to my computer via firewire. Everything is working fine when I do this but I have a question about the audio channels. The cable that I use to go from the 8mm to the DV Cam has three RCA-type ends for the 8mm side and a 1/8" jack for the DV end. Of course since I only have one audio channel at the source, one of the RCA ends is unused.

Since the source audio is mono, I want the mono sound to be transferred to both the left and right channels.

1) Does it matter if I use the left or right RCA end for the mono audio?

2) How do I get the single channel transferred to both the left and right audio channels? The DV Cam has a setting for audio output that can be either L/R (default), L/L or R/R. I thought that if I use the right channel for input to the DV cam, I should choose R/R for the output but the manual doesn't explicitly state this. Here's the only documentation for those settings:

Turn the selector dial to select a setting option.
• L/R: Stereo: L+R channels, Bilingual: Main+Sub.
• L/L: Stereo: L channel, Bilingual: Main.
• R/R:Stereo: R channel, Bilingual: Sub.

Am I interpreting this correctly? I don't really understand what the bilingual settings have to do with this.

My ultimate goal is to transfer these tapes to DVD and I understand that I should use 16-bit audio output mode (on the DV cam) to achieve the 48KHz audio sampling rate compatible with DVD.

Any help on this matter would be greatly appreciated.

[The village idiot]

here is a much more simple solution. Get or make a "Y" adaptor for the audio. It should be 1 male RCA connector to 2 female RCA connectors. That way you get the mono audio from the 8mm to both audio channels on the DV cam, otherwise I think you will have to mess around to make a dual audio stream to use with the DV correctly. In the US you can get them at RadioShack for about $2.00, other areas of the world should have similar stores.

[Nolonemo]

The village idiot is wise. I did this transferring mono 8mm via analog pass-though and it worked just fine.