connecting to interface question

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mofat

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I have a karaoke player with RCA out. Could I use RCA to trs cable into 1 channel input in my interface? Any prob with stereo to mono????
 
mofat said:
Oh man thx. I almost made a grave error.
Click to expand...

No, you didn't. Not to take anything away from the excellent advice the chaps have given you, do not be afraid of audio connections. Truth is you can connect almost any output to almost any input with impunity.

It might be noisy, might be distorted, might hum like a cnut but it is very unlikely to smoke! Biggest no-no is speaker outputs. These can do damage, many volts and plenty of amps.

Golden Rules (which "we" have been known to ignore!) : Turn off power to everything before trying a connection regime. Make sure all gains are at minimum and all volume controls the same.
Connect up.
Switch on and then slowly advance gains and volume controls. a'harkening all the time. If all is clean and nice result! If things sound in any way bad, back off pots and switch off.

Dave.
 
Hate it when wires let the smoke out. Really hard to get it back in again...:D
 
ecc83 has it right - assuming you leave out loudspeaker connections, you can try things without real concern, if you simply turn down the gains before you connect. When I first started doing sound on sound, the recorder had a ¼" mono jack for microphones, and the same for line inputs, so in a push you could plug a line in into the mc input, and just turn up the level a tiny, tiny bit. Your ears told you, in conjunction with the needle in the meter hitting the end stop with violence, that you had gone a bit too far. This way you had the capability for two line ins. Equally, I found that an SM57 into the line input when stuck in front of my guitar cab speaker would work with the gain on full - for distorted guitar the hiss doing this caused wasn't audible. As I got better and better gear the need to do this kind of thing went away, but I personally never had problems tapping off the signal from a loudspeaker working quietly, and slapping it into a line input. Nowadays everyone seems to be very wary of things going bang, or producing smoke, and in 35 years I have never destroyed any input because I follow my own guidelines.

Other people do seem to be less careful and do damage their gear. Experimentation seems to be considered dangerous nowadays. Many of the classic tracks feature very strange things.

Anybody remember making guitar voice tubes? Sticking a small speaker in a box, running a bit of petrol syphoning tube up the mic stand and doing a Peter Frampton? If you turned the volume up too far and hit a chord, you spontaneously vommited! We don;t do that anymore, either.
 
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