pin 3 hot gear. Is it even worth keeping it pin 3 hot?

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Any gear that is XLR in- XLR out does not have a hot pin... (think about it).

For power amps you can just swap the leads to the speaker and get it right.

main place this causes issues is large systems with mixed equipment, and interfacing between 2 wire and 3 wire circuits.

JR

 
imo. it's still best to have whole setup same way..

...once in a gig it took a while to hunt down what coused that bass nulling, it was jbl:)
 
Hi Abe,

No to answer your question.  As John alluded to above pin 3 hot gear is no problem if you into and out of it in balanced form - the signal passes through as intended.  If you were to go balanced in unbalanced out then your polarity has indeed flipped or if you were using a pin 3 hot power amp for example.  I don't have any pin 3 hot gear but if I did it would be modded and noted on the rear.

Cheers,
Ruairi
 
pucho812 said:
decided to make phase flip cables.... pin 3 hot one side pin 2 hot on the other... Marked with printed heat shrink....
Your "polarity" flip cables should be well marked, and only used when problems arise.
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That reminds me of a funny story... I was working at Peavey in the middle of the pin 2 hot awakening... Peavey decided to use pin 3 hot decades earlier so we had to deal with lots of legacy issues.

I recall one customer with a XLR-in/XLR-out rack product who proudly told me how he had fixed his units pin 3 hot problem by reversing pin 2 and 3 on his input jacks...

I almost didn't have the heart to tell him, he had just screwed up his unit, so it was now reversing the polarity for all signals.    ;D

JR
 
Ohhhhh ok! duh that makes sense, I was sitting here thinking about it for a lot longer than I should have.. lol ???
It gets polarity reversed on input and then flipped again on output. Silly me.

haha and that is a funny story.
 
Some old stuff like the BSS DPR402 is still wired in hot pin 3 and have got the output (or the input, sorry don't remember) wired "hot 3 unbalanced". If it's connected with "Hot 2 unbalanced" gear, you've got no sound... If you're connected to "Hot 2 balanced", you're fine (and even phase acurate !).
The bigger french PA renter is wired hot 3 because of that kind of problems.
But "live" problems are not "studio" problems and your DPR can have it's proper wires to work in your system as you never unplug everything from desk xlr inputs to speakers input like in a "live" work...
 
I don't mean to hijack the thread, but the balanced I/O with 'pin 3 hot' thing reminds me of a story my brother, an electrician, told me.  He once installed 3-way light switches (two switches controlling one light) in a room of a client's house, and she later called him to complain that he had messed up the job, because the light was sometimes off, even though the switches were both in the 'on' position. 

(Yes, she was serious....  ::)  ;D )
 
my preference is to change everything to pin 2 hot.

in a studio with many pieces of gear and in many studio that have guest gear come in
it makes more sense to go with the standard...this is because of calls like "dude, when i patch
from the api eq to the trident compressor i lose signal."

unbalanced gear in a "pro" recording studio (or any other studio for that matter) is pretty common.
it may not get used often, but when it does, and it's with pin 3 hot gear, somebody's got a problem.

ok, so i haven't gotten around to changing the roughly 200 xlr connectors on the back of our
A range console from pin 3 hot to pin 2, but it's gonna happen soon.

maybe this is not an issue in studios where there is only one guy workin
but with outside geeks booking time, i think it's a good idea.
 

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