unbalanced vs balanced, headphone amp

  • Thread starter Thread starter jboy
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jboy

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Hello all.

I just bought a snake and realized that it is Unbalanced. I always thought that XLR was always balanced. but i guess not.

So my question is... whats the difference between balanced and unbalanced and how do i get around it. I am trying to run a send to the other room thru the snake to feed a Headphone amp... and it seems that the 1/4" side is not working right. i have to not slid it in all the way. I thought that if the 1/4" was TRS that it would be ok... but i guess not. Do all headphone amps need balanced... or just TRS.

also... since the whole snake seems to not be balanced... will this affect any recording thru XLR to XLR that i do?

thanks and sorry for the newbie questions.
 
1/4" TRS and xlr cables are balanced. do you have a link to the snake you bought?
 
i'm confused. you have a female to male xlr snake. it's balanced. where does the 1/4" cable come into play?

describe the signal chain completely.
 
I had it modified mainly because i have a Digi 002. and it has 4 XLR and 4 1/4".

the box says unbalanced.
http://gallery.me.com/jiggityj#100007/photo

here is what i had it modified to.

1-7: female XLR
8: Male 1/4" TRS
to
1-4: Male XLR
5-8 Male 1/4" TRS


so... i want channel 8 to be the headphone send to the other end of the snake... and it does. but the stereo headphone amp only plays one side... unless i pull the 1/4 out alittle
 
Jboy.... if what you have for a snake is in the picture it looks like they may have packaged it wrong at the factory. For it sure does look to be a balanced snake.
One sure way to find out is to dismantle one of the XLR ends (easy as pie) and if you see 3 wires connected to the 3 pins, it's balanced.Put it back together and Enjoy.
And if there are only 2 wires .....send it back!


Or just cut the snake in half and count your total wires inside, if there are 24 you had an 8 channel balanced snake........now you have 2 four foot 8 channel snakes that terminate to raw ends. :laughings:

Sounds as if your headphone amp is unbalanced.






:cool:
 
Haha.. or i could do that.

So.. i opened them up and XLR and 1/4 both have 3 wires. so thats good and i do have balanced all around.

I also just figured out why i was only getting one side at the other end of the snake. On the back of the Digi 002 there are L and R 1/4 outputs... and i only have the left side plugged in. guess i need to plug the snake channel into the front headphone 1/4 and not the back

moresound said:
Or just cut the snake in half and count your total wires inside, if there are 24 you had an 8 channel balanced snake........now you have 2 four foot 8 channel snakes that terminate to raw ends. :laughings:

:cool:
Click to expand...
 
Jboy..... are you liking your 002? We have one that was upgraded by black lion have you heard about this modification?






:cool:
 
moresound said:
Jboy..... are you liking your 002? We have one that was upgraded by black lion have you heard about this modification?
:cool:
Click to expand...

So far i think it is awesome... a big change going from a Tascam Portastudio to a DAW setup... but i like it. I always ended up exporting all the tracks from my portastudio to a computer anyways. So.. i figured it would just skip this step.

I have not heard of this mod... what does it do?
 
Google it up..... they change out the mic preamps for upgrade ones and put in (2) new power supply's, and a few other things.





:cool:
 
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