Hoping for some advice. I am on a mission to have all my gear routed into a TRS patch bay (ART-48) and into my UFX III. 90% of my cables are unbalanced.
I have a gain reduction issue when I route in and out of the patchbay. For example, out of an Analog Rytm > PB > Analog Heat > PB > UFX, I loose around 11 DB.
I have tried going through the patchbay using TRS cables and I did not have a volume issue with the AR.
Do I need to replace all my cables? Is it just a gain thing that I can make up in Ableton, or should I be using TRS throughout? I also had a couple of polarity issues where I would assume the cable is shorting.
Thanks for any help on this, would appreciate any advice.
The unbalanced cable is grounding half the output of the AR (the R in āTRSā is being shorted to ground), so youāre only getting half the signal, hence the gain loss.
So yes, using TRS cables will ensure the signal being sent by the AR down both the tip and ring of the TRS cable will be received by the UFX.
So the solution is to either increase the gain on the UFX inputs to compensate for the reduced signal from a TS cable (which will theoretically increase the noise floor), or use TRS cables.
I donāt know about the ART-48, but I have been running several NYS-SPP-L1 patchbays for many years now, and I have always used TRS cables with them.
In a few instances (like with Moog Sirin, of all devices) I had to run TR cables into the patchbay, but then it is TRS all the way.
Unless gear output is specifically not compatible with balanced TRS connections, then you should always run TRS connections.
The more sources you are recording simultaneously in separate stems (or mix down) the more noise from cables will get in the mix. Balanced connections help with that.
Wow thanks for all the replies guys. I have found a supplier with a bulk deal that will cost me around 80 GBP to replace the various lengths to Balanced TRS. In the scheme of things its a small price to pay to make sure everything works.
As i mentioned, I ran a full balanced routing through my patchbay and it overclipped my UFX (so clearly works lo).
I would assume i need to get balanced patch cables too? lol
Some of my stuff is pretty similar - unbalanced cables into ART-48 into UCX II. I didnāt see much point in balanced for the patchbay since everythingās pretty close together and basically everything I have is unbalanced aside from the interface.
I donāt have everything fully set up to test at the moment but Iāve patched through multiple things in chains before and havenāt noticed any large gain reductionā¦ Certainly nothing like 11db!
This has given me a bit of fear about going and buying something with balanced outsā¦ Ironically Iāve been pondering splashing out on a RYTM as well!
Okay great. And TRS will work fine when plugged into source with something like a Minitaur? I read it is better to have the connection to unbalanced as close to the source
I think since you have a mish mash of gear (everybody does, lol) you might want to just take some TRS and TS cables over an afternoon and test everything individually. I did it, marked everything in my phoneās notes app along with the RMS levels of everything without any signal going down and I think it saved some of my sanity in the end, along with a few $$ along the way. Get a p-touch and label it all too if you can so you know whatās what.
If my interface is TRS, my patchbay is TRS and a good amout of my gear is too, I would assume I will need to order a good amount of balanced cables regardless thoguh, right? What was your solution for hardware with unbalanced outs?
It didnāt seem to matter mostly in my case - my problem wound up being ground noise and I fixed that by running everything through the same outlet pair and power conditioner. A cable snake(s), if practical, would cost a bit less than individual cables and might help.
This isnāt how it works with Elektron devices which are not fully balanced, but impedance balanced. The devices already (by design) ground the ring as part of the cheaper (but doubly compatible) impedance balanced outs. They are not fully differential with a plus and minus signal on tip and ring, the ring is only inverting the ground noise, so it has some benefit. But it makes no difference to the potential output levels from Elektron devices as they generate the same signal level whether received at unbalanced or balanced devices (because the balanced device only sees signal on tip, the same as the unbalanced device)
Not for the benefit of output level from the Elektron devices, you will only get a small benefit in terms of noise (the ring noiseis inverted) if the cables are long and poorly shielded or the working environment is noisy
A simple take home from this is that if the cables were short and well made/screened, the environment was ācleanā then irrespective of what type of cable (TS/TRS) you used connecting any Elektron to anything else (whether it was āproperlyā balanced or not) it would make no difference in output levels or meaningful noise levels.
With lots of connections where devices are balanced ācompatibleā (including the Elektrons) then it would be a potential recipe for noise that even an impedance balanced (i.e noise rejection is facilitated on the ring which does not carry any sent signal at all from an Elektron) would start to help with, but as i said in the first reply, itās nothing to do with signal level which was the thrust of your question.
Thereās no harm (except to pocket) of using TRS cables where you can, but donāt tell yourself it will help a signal level issue, it might alleviate potential noise issues (at best)
There are a few more topics on this where more detail will be discussed. Itās important to take note that Elektron devices donāt have āfullyā balanced outputs, they have respectably hot outputs, but it is unbalanced and balanced compatible. So you donāt lose level as such, as a fully balanced signal may typically be in the same ballpark voltage-wise.
TS or TRS from Elektron into and out of your patchbay will be no different, it will still only have the healthy āhotā sound signal on the tip, and inverted noise on the ring
Thanks for this response. What is causing the loss in db in exactly that routing example I shared? I had assumed it was an issue with the unbalanced cable shorting.
Appriciate you sharing your knowledge with me. Is it not better to replace all cables with balanced in this scenario still though? It seems to me like a <Ā£100 fix for an ongoing problem (even if some cable swaps will have negligible improvements).
use whichever cables you want, itāll be easier if they are all the same and you mitigate the potential for noise, nothing wrong with TRS except cost and your op references āneedā ā¦ iām not sure whatās causing the level drop you experience
but a way to prove what it isnāt is to use TS and TRS from one of your Elektrons and compare signal levels in a simple setup ā¦ then add from there until you see a drop, then see whatās going on within that device ā¦ especially one which translates its signal into the digital domain
Yeah, I was gonna sayā¦ This sounds like it needs more testing to try and isolate the issue. Just go from the AR into the patchbay and out into one other thing, if it sounds alright add one more device into the chain etc.
Hopefully a big drop occurs when adding something specific but if itās more of a gradual cumulative drop, that might be the time to start worrying about replacing every connection. Iād be surprised if the latter ended up as extreme as that though.
Thanks. Regardless, I will need quite a lot of Balanced cables, so think im going to make my life easier and order a bunch to replace. At least I will have some cables to troubleshoot with lol
lol