k brown
Well-known member
Being strictly a location engineer with no studio experience, why aren't alll studios wired with XLRs for mic in, and TRS for line in?
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Being strictly a location engineer with no sudio experience, why aren't alll studios wired with XLRs for mic in, and TRS for line in?
Because a lot of pro outboard is line level and uses XLRs. You idea will certainly work but you would need a lot of XLR to TRS adaptors and sooner or later someone is going to plug the XLR end of one into an input with phantom power on it.Being strictly a location engineer with no studio experience, why aren't alll studios wired with XLRs for mic in, and TRS for line in?
Even if the outputs are capacitor coupled, one would need to be sure that the caps are rated for 63v, which isn't gauranteed on much of the gear I have looked at over the years....OP, are you sure your synth does not have capacitor coupled outputs?
I see no reason to DC couple a low level output, unless you want 0.001Hz bass response.
Adding output coupling caps shouldn't be too hard, cut a wire or a trace put in a leaded cap or an SMT cap, if some bonehead forgot to include it.
Mic inputs are special, they are not "line" level.
OP, are you sure your synth does not have capacitor coupled outputs?
I see no reason to DC couple a low level output, unless you want 0.001Hz bass response.
Adding output coupling caps shouldn't be too hard, cut a wire or a trace put in a leaded cap or an SMT cap, if some bonehead forgot to include it.
Mic inputs are special, they are not "line" level.
Even if the oututs are capacitor coupled, one would need to be sure that the caps are rated for 63v, which isn't gauranteed on much of the gear I have looked at over the years....
This is exactly how I’ve always done it as well.In a few studio builds, I specified that the mic lines from the wall panels in the tracking space(s) terminate in a panel in the control room which had male XLRs for the incoming signals. The same panel also had female XLRs for connection to the mic preamp inputs. Short male-female XLR cables did the patching.
The reasoning was that the bantam patchbays used for the line level patching weren't really reliable for the mic levels. For instruments. we used DI's.
Bri
I agree! Unfortunately, I have also come across many cases where there was phantom power at the input of the line. Otherwise, it is worth turning it off, even for dynamic microphones, because it can produce significant dielectric noise in the cables (when they are moved or stepped on). (I used to be a sound engineer for rock bands.)I just checked the M1516 schematic. It has a pair of switchable mic inputs which are fed phantom power. There is a +4dBu input position on the mic gain switch which bypasses the mic pre but for some unknown reason it does not disable the phantom power. Even in the +4 position, the input impedance is only 1K3 which could be problematic for some synth output. I think you definitely need some form of protection such as that proposed by Bill.
Cheers
Ian
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