unbalanced vs. balanced question: 8*Bus + 888's

[evan harmon]

I'm moving up to Mix and getting two 888|24's for use with a used mackie 8*bus.

I'd like to use aux sends as the inputs to my 888's as their freely assignable - however some of the aux send outputs on the 8*bus are unbalanced.

The 888 inputs are balanced though... is it a bad idea to plug a balanced cable into the unbalanced aux sends?

This seems like a newbie question, yet i couldnt find an answer to it searching this forum, nor mackie's online forum.

Any help would be much appreciated! [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

-Evan

[mdvirtual]

Evan,

I'd recommend using the 8 busses for one 888/24 and 8 of the direct outs for the other, running everything balanced. With this scenario you'll have 8 Pro Tools inputs that can be freely assigned and the other 8 fixed.

Another thought is to run all the 888/24 inputs to a TRS patchbay mounted above the console, and use the Mackie's jack field as a patchbay, in which case every input would be freely patchable.

With only 6 sends it really isn't practical to use them to feed Pro Tools. You also risk a lot of routing confusion/mistakes if you aren't religious about zeroing your console.

[Michael Ellis]

Originally posted by evan harmon:
The 888 inputs are balanced though... is it a bad idea to plug a balanced cable into the unbalanced aux sends?

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">I totally agree with Mr. Damon, it doesn't make much sense to use your sends to get signal to the 888s. His suggestion is very smart.

To answer your question, though, if you customise your cables to be balanced/unbalanced, you could do it. It's something very common for connecting older processing units. You just need to make sure that the unbalanced end of the cable has the cold wire soldered to the ground wire at the post (ring to sleeve, in a typical TRS cable).

Cheers, and good luck.

[Ben Jenssen]

I use a berhinger 8-bus this way. It works very nicely. I take external pre amps and feed them balanced into "line" on the mixer channels. I disable EQ on them. And balanced from group outs and bal. into 001.
Remember that you can return a recording signal to headphones directly from the Mackie and have no latency in HP, just remember to pull down the fader on the recording PT track.

[evan harmon]

thanks for the replies everyone!

I also read the submaster part in the manual wrong - i was thinking they were outputs - totally missed the insert part.

The submaster inserts are unbalanced - so I'm going to get a patchbay. Anyone have any recommendations? I'm guessing I need one that accepts the balanced to my 888, and the unbalanced patched out to my 8*bus.

Any patchbay brand recommendations?

-Evan