pin3 hot question

[gang of elk]

i just discovered that my adr compex is wired pin 3 hot. to make it jive w rest of my gear which is pin 2 hot, should i reverse pin 2 and 3 on input, output, or both? the unit's I/O has the transformer option, does this make any difference when considering reversing pin 2 and 3?

thanks, -scott

 

[Greg]

I'm not sure if you're talking reversing internally or not? I have a DBX comp that is pin 3 hot. All I did was made sure that when I wired it to my patchbay, I wired pin 3 to tip and pin 2 to ring, on both the inputs and the outputs. You could do it internally if you want, though. In general, just make sure that the hot on "gear A" goes to the hot on "gear B," and you should be fine. Hope this helps a little.

 

[gang of elk]

thanks greg. yes i was planning to just reverse the wires connected to the xlrs inside the rear panel, mostly to save confusion elsewhere.

now that i've had my morning coffee i understand more clearly how simple it is, just wanted to double check. cheers.

 

[Greg]

You know what, that's not a bad idea... I think I'm going to change my DBX comp internally, too. It'll take longer for my iron to heat up than it will for me to swap 4 wires.

 

[gang of elk]

i'll race ya!

 

[Kev]

The PA world here in Australia many years ago was pin 3 hot. A sign of the times.

I think it is now pretty safe world wide to convert all your gear and live in a pin 2 hot world.

It probably doesn't matter how or why these things happened or changed but concertrate on understanding the issues and problems that might arrise from changes and then to also know your gear and the other gear you may deal with. Knowing means more than looking at the spec or instruction book.

Test you gear when you first get it ... flip the lid and have a visual inspection and take nothing for granted.
Know your gear

 

[thermionic]

The method I use is to label cables if they're reversed, rather than adapt the hardware. If you ever sold the unit the next owner could be in for some puzzling occurences: "why's there no vocal on the left?" :shock:

Test you gear when you first get it ... flip the lid and have a visual inspection and take nothing for granted.
Know your gear

Very important point :guinness:

Justin

 

[Steve Jones]

[quote author="Kev"]The PA world here in Australia many years ago was pin 3 hot. A sign of the times.
[/quote]

The Jands juggernaut in Australia used to wire everything pin 3 hot because originally Yamaha did the same, and they chose Yamaha's convention. Many smaller PA companies followed their lead. The studios here of course for the most part followed the "X L R - Earth-Live-Return" pin 2 hot protocol, but I remember as a studio guy being yelled at by Jands' senior tech once when I innocently asked him why Jands wires everything back to front. Funny though, it was a year or 2 later they went pin 2 hot.

There was no right or wrong to it of course, but the convention of pin 2 hot eventually became the norm.

 

[Kev]

Steve chose to widen my comment and put a NSW slant to it and yes, Jands was a juggernaut in Australia.

Working in both Broadcast and personally owning and running a PA System made things very hard for me. I made mistakes on both fronts from time to time.
:roll:
Yes Kev made mistakes.
I wired hundreds... thousands of XL3 leads and gear and to have two standard just messed with my head.

arrrggghhh :shock:

I'm so glad we got back on track.

 

[gang of elk]

thanks guys, good points all around. i don't have a way to test other than to insert the unit on one side of a stereo signal and listen for phase cancellation but i did that and my ears told me that pin3 was still hot so i reversed it and wrote on the back of the unit in sharpee, 'pin 2 hot!'. should save on confusion in the future. thanks again for your thoughts on the matter. -scott

 

[BYacey]

On a comp or other piece of outboard gear that has balanced in and outs, what does it matter? The phase doesn't change from input to output, when pin 2 swings positive on the input, pin 2 should swing positive on the output.

 

[Kev]

[quote author="BYacey"]On a comp or other piece of outboard gear that has balanced in and outs, what does it matter? [/quote]

It can matter when two units are used on a common source and one unit is configured opposite.

It can matter when an attempt to unbalance gets you out of phase from input to output.

I still say ... know your gear.