gain-staging: balanced/unbalanced

  • Thread starter Thread starter FALKEN
  • Start date Start date
yeah id say that your think into it too hard also. if your goin balanced into un balanced just start low and watch your meters so you dont clip the -10 with to hot an input. if your goin unbalanced to balanced youll be losing a bit and will have to compansate with output which sucks sometimes because with noisy gear youll be raising noise floor. i just had to deal with this alot because the board i bought is mostly unbalanced and all my pres are balanced. what i did is set up a seperate snake for pres only, hit that then go straight into the balanced inputs on my tape machine. then i know ive got a good strong signal to tape. then i go to a bay which is unbalanced for monitoring and mixing which is where i patch in most of my comps. seems to work well and havnt had any noise problems yet.
 
i can see that. imagine this situation!!

pre is balanced. that goes right into my unbalanced tape recorder. which upon playback goes into a balanced compressor, then an unbalanced mixer. aarrrgh!! on top of it, I have some eq's that have balanced TRS jacks, and unbalanced rca jacks, which I could patch to my patchbay if I made some cables. then I could patch it in as balanced OR unbalanced. faaahq! so far i haven't done this.
 
going from the balanced pre to the unbalanced tape input, you won't loose anything. You only loose 6db going from unbalanced to balanced. Still it isn't a big deal as long as you have the headroom and gain in the unbalanced piece.
 
EXCEPT on one of my balanced (tube) pre manuals it says you have to have the volume at least past 5 or you are not getting the full sound. AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!
 
Is your tape deck -10? You might want to put a compressor in line (set at 1/1) and use the output gain to turn down the level.

It is a common problem. Trying to keep a dynamic source into a mic pre enough to get that 'sound' is a pain.
 
Farview said:
Is your tape deck -10? You might want to put a compressor in line (set at 1/1) and use the output gain to turn down the level.

It is a common problem. Trying to keep a dynamic source into a mic pre enough to get that 'sound' is a pain.
Click to expand...

yeah dude. fostex e-16. not a bad idea.


whoever thought of having 2 different signal levels was a f'ing db.
 
No man, don't put a transformer between the units. You will loose a lot of soundquality. Especially with the cheap ones. If your audiocard doesn´t have bal input then you'll just have to live with sacrificing 6dB.
 
I picked up an RNC and that is unbalanced +4. AHHH!!!

so I realized that its not unbalanced/balanced that makes the huge difference but rather which line level you are running.....bah.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top