equipment balanced or not?

  • Thread starter Thread starter ikijapan
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ikijapan

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Hi there,

Can someone help please, I have had my home studio set up for quite some time and am trying to upgrade little things here and there and now realised I never payed any attention to balanced cables...

So here's my question:
I have a sound card that has all balanced inputs and outputs (Emu 1820),
but I have no balanced cables (except XLR mic cables of course). So, looking at my monitor I see it clearly says "balanced inputs", so that's easy, I'll replace those cables. But all of my other equipment doesn't really say either way. In particular I have a yamaha s90 keyboard, roland td-20, and marshall AVT150 amp with emulated output for DI.

I have googled all this equipment to death and have all the manuals and none of the 3 pieces of equipment say either balanced or phone jack or unbalanced anywhere...

But from the reading I have gathered that it is quite common that these types of instruments are unbalanced outputs...is there anyway to know for sure? Does anyone know about these ? On the TD-20 I am using the 8 direct outputs for best recording quality...


Thanks
 
It's really easy, just plug a balanced cable into the jack in question..... slowly. There should be two clicks as it goes in if it's balanced, or only one if it's not. If you don't hear it, you should be able to feel it. As you push it in you'll feel some resistance, and then it'll kind of pop into place. If you can then push it further in to a second position, then it's balanced.
 
If the documentation makes no mention of balanced connections... they generally are not...

You can also use a flashlight and take a gander...
 
i forget where is was, but Harvey Gerst posted an interesting note once about balancing your setup. Basically (please correct me if i am wrong) it said that if you have unbalanced grear in your chain, you are likely to lose quality of signal by using balanced cabling when your stuff says it can be balanced/unbalanced. The gear will convert balanced to unbalanced, run the signal throught he gear and then convert it back. So by feeding it an unblanced signal in the first place, you save one stage of covnerting the signal.

I know this is a gorss simplification, i am going to go look for the post.

Daav
 
If you can't figure out if your gear is balanced, you can also ask here and the people here can probably tell you if it's balanced or not.
 
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