Alexbt said:
Well, that sounds like a high budget option for a simple request.
What they guy wants to make is a small cable that has one female XLR for the mic that goes out to two male XLRs. Sounds simple enough to create, but will it work?
EDIT: Seems I completely skipped over a big portion of the initial post. (So tired, though I still wonder if that would work, for lower scale splitting)
Yeah, Y cables work just fine for the most part. That's all a passive splitter with no transformers is, a bunch of Y cables in a box. I used to have 16 Y cables that I used as my split for monitors, and I set them up for recording a few times as well. Like I said, being on the same circuit as FOH goes a long way towards eliminating any ground loop problems most of the time.
A passive direct splitter with ground lifts gives you a simpler way to deal with some ground loop issues, is neater, and saves some set-up time, that's all.
A passive transformer split totally isolates each piece of gear, pretty much gauranteeing a clean signal on both sides. Not all ground loop problems can be solved using ground lifts or using the same power, other problems can come up linking two consoles, lots of recording trucks have generators, etc. and so for many pro location recordists, it's worth the expense.
After that, there are active splitters, and active splitters with transformers. Time to sell the house
.
Just for perspective, most every sound company and band in the world used or still uses passive splitters with no transformers (Y cables in a box) for monitors, from Joe bar-gig up to world-class events in huge stadiums, with pretty much zero problems. Transformers are/were usually for recording or broadcast, and even then I bet more often than not in the past, non-transformer splits were the way more common way to go, no matter what they were used for. And in some situations, the recording guys will take the passive split anyway, and have the FOH guys take the transformer split, as they feel the direct passive split is a more pure signal.
There is some neat stuff out there on the high end. I think it's either the Grand Ole Opry, or Austin City Limits, I can't remember, they have all remote-control mic pres with active splits on stage that feed the various consoles, for instance. Some high-end location recording rigs use this setup too, and it's getting more common on high-end live gigs as well. Digital snakes are starting to gain some ground. Same deal, pres on stage controlled by computer. But that stuff is the bleeding edge, with a bleeding-edge price.
For most of us, passive with no transformers is just fine, either Y cables or a box or a splitter snake. The next time you go see a show, and think the vocals are great, think for a second that the mic is probably driving at least two mic pres through many hundreds of feet of mic cable.
ps- Horizon, EWI, and ProCo make some nifty four-channel rackmount transformer splitters, pretty cheap, too. Many companies also make single-channel versions in a DI-type box.