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10
When you’re just getting
into pro sound, you hear these
phrases batted around a lot.
They represent the two kinds
of audio connectors and cables
you’re going to encounter
There’s a big difference.
An unbalanced cable has
two conductors — a signal
wire and a ground
wire. You can easily
iden-
tify an unbal-
anced cable by
its connectors
because each
wire requires
only two con-
ductors at the
connector. A
standard
TS
(or
“tip-sleeve”)
guitar cable
an unbalanced
cable: so is a
standard RCA cable used for
many audio/video components
such as DVD players.
An unbalanced cable does
a decent job of rejecting noise
over short, but unfortunately,
the wire itself also acts like an
antenna and picks up noise in
long runs.
Unbalanced
cables
should not be more than
about-20 feet (4-6 meters) in
length, especially when used in
noisy environments and with
signals that are medium level to
begin with, such as those from
keyboards or MP3 devices, etc.
The connector on the end of an
unbalanced
¼
” TS (Tip-Sleeve)
jack has
two
sections.
A balanced cable has three
conductors in the connector and
three wires in the cable. Because
1 2
Balanced versus unbalanced: what’s the deal here?
Hooking up your SoundLink
Hook
-up
/Back panel
Analog C
ontr
ols
Digital C
ontr
ols
devices such as DVD players or
feeds from a laptop (the balanced
mono XLR
MIC IN
jack on each
stereo channel is for connecting
a mono microphone only).
The stereo
LINE IN
jacks are
marked
LEFT
(MONO)
and
RIGHT
.
If you are only connecting a
mono input, use the
LEFT
(MONO).
Mic In and Line In jacks
on these channels
CANNOT be used at the
same time.
How do stereo input chan-
nels know if they’re being sent
a mono or stereo input? You
“tell them” via the
SOURCE
MIC/
LINE
LINE
button on each stereo
channel.
In the
LINE
button
up
position,
the channel defaults to mono mi-
crophone input; press
LINE
and
the channel is ready to receive
left and right components of a
balanced stereo input.
