Aw goddamn, I wrote up a whole response to a lot of your comments and it got deleted. But this is all really helpful, and I appreciate the responses. I think I’m starting to understand a bit.
I have a related question that I think might help me understand a bit better. I’m thinking about how I can set up my patch bay so I don’t have to plug or in plug anything from any of my gear. So I’m wondering—with all other variables held constant, can the simple act of plugging in a cable to a piece of gear (namely fx processing gear) alter the internal circuit path?
I know that this can happen in some instances, for example when I plug in a 1/4” line input to the a channel strip on my mixer, it bypasses the mic input. So, plugging in the ts cable to the line in changes how the current is allowed to flow within the circuit. But what about in other situations, particularly as I said with fx gear?
To continue using the RNC as an example—if I’m running a guitar track through the left channel, just using the RNC in mono, and then I plug a ts cable with no current going through it into the side chain jack—will the RNC automatically stop listening to the guitar track as the source for making compression decisions, and listen to the dead signal coming from the side chain input? If that’s the case, then I’ll have to stick my head behind my little rack to unplug or plug in the RNC’s side chain every time i want to use it.
The thing to remember is that all equipment, mono and stereo goes to the patchbay to either one channel, or two - so a 'stereo' device with 1 3.5mm stereo output goes to two channels on the patchbay, unbalanced. you can of course always take one source (on the top row) and over patch it from the top row to the next channel, if you've done something clever on just one channel and want that mirrored on the left and right output.
Rob, I’ve read this like five times and I know it contains useful information but I can’t totally follow thanks to my little noob brain. I understand that a TRS cable can either carry an unbalanced stereo signal or a balanced mono signal, but I didn’t quite follow the rest. Could you shed a bit more light on this idea for me? It seems important.
Thanks again, all