On Sat, 2009-08-15 at 14:04 -0500, Brent Busby wrote:
It's fine. All pro audio balanced connections are low impedance outs
to high impedance ins. This is done so that you can mult outputs (make
copies) and the inputs won't mind a lower dB input signal.
Rich...
Is it wrong to use a regular cable (no transformer) to
connect the XLR
main and submix group outputs of a console to the TRS (balanced) inputs
of an audio card, or should impedance matching be done in that case?
It is quite common in music stores these days to find cables that are
XLR male on one end and TRS male on the other. (I'm currently using
those on my mixer outputs.) The cables *are* balanced, but they do not
contain a transformer at all.
The impedance of my console's main/submix outputs is rated as less than
75 ohms, but the input impedance of my audio card is 10k ohm. This
would seem to almost answer the question by itself, it weren't for the
near impossibility of actually finding a matching transformer that's TRS
and not TS on its 1/4" end. I looked at a lot of them. They're all
made for hooking up guitars, amps, and mics, and they all seem to have
an unbalanced plug opposite from the XLR end.
If there is indeed a need transformers on each XLR mixer output in this
instance, where can I get one that won't unbalance the connection in the
process? Or is it fine to just use these common XLR->TRS cables that
don't have any? The reason I started to investigate this is because I'm
not sure I'm not getting some of the "tone suck" you might associate
with a badly matched connection, and this seems a likely cause.
Addendum: On the realtime end of things, I'm now achievable a solid,
unbreakable 2ms. I can't seem to do anything that causes an xrun.
That's good at least!