Does anyone have any thoughts or criticisms of the Neutrik Combo Connectors?
- Thread starter ob
- Start date
skippy
New member
I only know of two real downsides. The biggest one is that they are only available with female XLRs, so all your XLR patches would need to be male-male (unless you set a regular male XLR right next door and multed it on). The other is that the TRS jack doesn't reliably contact the 1/4" telephone-type TRS connectors (with the skinny tip and contact lifter ridge, used on patch cables for telephone-type longframe patchbays). It only works well with regular 1/4" TRS plugs. That's not a really big knock against it, though: there are very few shortframe jacks that _can_ work reliably with the telephone-type plugs. And hell, very few of us actually use the telephone-type stuff anyway, these days: the cheap regular-TRS bays have pretty much taken over for hobby applications.
I almost used the combos for my own access panel (adjacent to my main telephone-type patchbays, used for getting the odd unusual signal into it without requiring kluge cables or jamming a regular TRS into the telephone-type jacks, which they _don't_ like). But I decided against it- simply because I already had a bunch of paid-for male and female XLRs in the parts bin. They'd probably work very well, as long as your working style makes it unlikely that you'll ever patch mic lines with phantom power onto unprotected inputs, or hotpatch mics into their preamps through the TRS connections (which short tip/ring/sleeve during the mate/demate cycles)...
I almost used the combos for my own access panel (adjacent to my main telephone-type patchbays, used for getting the odd unusual signal into it without requiring kluge cables or jamming a regular TRS into the telephone-type jacks, which they _don't_ like). But I decided against it- simply because I already had a bunch of paid-for male and female XLRs in the parts bin. They'd probably work very well, as long as your working style makes it unlikely that you'll ever patch mic lines with phantom power onto unprotected inputs, or hotpatch mics into their preamps through the TRS connections (which short tip/ring/sleeve during the mate/demate cycles)...