Was thinking on something , Iron !!!!!

[andre tchmil]

last night I was thinking on the following.
In most of the analog consoles , the channel inserts are unbalanced, even in high end consoles.
Now if you want to use nice outboard with in / out trafo's , would it make sense (soundwise) to route the signal first to the outboard, and then to the console line ins ?
I know, compressors etc would act different by the gain change etc, but still ...

 

[NewYorkDave]

If the outboard piece has input/output transformers, what's the point? It won't be bothered by running into the unbalanced return.

You can run into trouble when trying to use certain active balanced outputs in an unbalanced return. I experienced this myself a few years ago when I was trying to use my Orban 424 in the inserts of two channels on my mixer. I was getting ridiculous crosstalk between the channels. Before too long, I realized that the low-side drivers of the active output stages were dumping big-time signal currents into ground because of running into the unbalanced returns.

Here's a thread that describes a simple device that will make your inserts safe to use with any balanced-output outboard:
http://www.groupdiy.com/index.php?topic=3249