Splitting Signal after the pre

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sr1200

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Dec 6, 2010
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Location
Long Island, NY USA
Anyone think there might be a sonic or impedance issue with splitting a signal at the patch bay after the mic pre?  I was thinking to get around some really strange latency issues i've been having lately to split the signal that goes to my live room monitoring chain directly for the artists monitoring and then just have my DAW output for me to listen to.  The advantage besides latency is that i can make the live mic louder or softer for their monitoring without changing the level that im listening to it at.  Just want to know if there could be any potential side effects from impedance or signal loss from doing the split that would be of any consequence.
Thanks :)
 
sr1200 said:
Just want to know if there could be any potential side effects from impedance or signal loss from doing the split that would be of any consequence.
It depends on the impedance of the equipment you connect your preamp to.
If you connect the preamp to two old-fashioned 600 ohm systems, you may overload it, but with modern equipment with typically 10-20kohm input Z, there is no ill effect.
 
Thanks.  And yes, i would be hitting 2 converters, one for the daw which is 10k i believe and the input on the digital mixer (converter) which is 10k also.
 
Should be fine unless you notice issues that you can't sort out some other way.

Most larger patchbays have a number of mult's which are just for that purpose. Just four patchpoints wired in parallel so you patch into one and walla! You now have three of that instead of 1...

I've used those for multing a mono aux-send to a L/R input on a reverb or other FX units, Multing tape out to numerous automated console channels for different voicing of mix elements, One track on a tape machine has different instrument overdubs... ie; tambo in chorus, slide gtr in verse, bells in bridge, and gtr solo in gtr solo section.... Mult it and mute it!

things like that...

Many times probably going through different outboard too which would be a combo of "more-vintage" and "less-vintage" with some of it being 600r gear.

Cheers,
jb
 
I use 10k edcors to isolate the splits in my setup, direct goes to the converters, then the transformer out goes to a 16 ch mixer....  Probably very overkill, but...  :D
 
You don't NEED splitter transformers... unless you need something like galvanic isolation, which can be great in troublesome circumstances or location recording, but should never be needed in permanent studio setups.

Most modern consoles like SSL's, Neve's etc will just parallel multitrack returns using bridging impedances.

Multing or paralleling is fine for bridging impedances, whereas improperly or unpredictably transformers can ring or introduce their own issues.

I simply mult all the time, and have never had an issue in about 35 years of doing it.
 
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