Mixing XLR and RCA cables

should you mix xlr and rca cables together well this question comes from michael in stevens point wisconsin and michael writes hey paul i'm two days into my eat diet oh good so for those of you that don't know the eat diet is a book i wrote on dieting i am much more severed i lost 20 23 pounds using this technique which will work for anyone you can you can lose whatever weight you want you can eat anything you want just have to control how much and uh it's called the eat diet and it it works it truly works so anyway you can buy it on on amazon the eat diet uh and i'm using my curiosity to get through the first few days and they are the first two or three days are tough and everything else is a breeze um so i thought uh now might be a good time to ask some questions you got it sir i'm a 48 year old truck driver and hoped to build my first ever good two-channel stereo system in 2021. yes nicely done i love it he's got a goal he's going to get in there and he's going to get after it i'm probably going to be mixing old and new equipment i already have decent tower speakers a subwoofer and a nice sony es cd player it cost me 2500 bucks about 15 years ago i'll bet that's a nice one i'm about to take the plunge into the front end of the system and probably should know this before going further does xlr have its benefits reduced or negated if there are rca cables in the mix well let's let's clear the cruft away and just start with some some basics here xlr cables on equipment that is designed properly is the best way to go so an xlr cable is a balanced cable and it uses something called common mode rejection to reject anything in common that comes in like noise hum that comes in through the cable so if i have here's this so here's an xlr cable and you can see at this kind of the end on here right that has three conductors if you can you can see right so those three conductors ground plus and minus are the essence of a balanced signal so the ground we know is the shield a separate uh you know place a starting point and everything above that is a signal electrically above that and so in a balanced signal you have your plus and your minus which means they're out of phase so as one signal is going up the other is going down so they do the seesaw sort of thing between the two and if this cable gets near a piece of equipment or gets near a humming transformer and that hum goes into this cable the balanced nature of this will eliminate the hum and you never hear it or hiss or whatever so balance is a good way to go and it sounds great on proper equipment balanced in balanced out okay an rca cable a single ended cable doesn't have that ability so here's where you want to be xlr if you can but in michael's place he's got a piece of vintage gear that maybe he's going to go to some new gear so you certainly don't want to go from a balanced output on this piece of gear to a single ended input over here because you'll lose all the benefits of it so just make sure that it's balanced to balanced or rca to rca and you'll probably be okay so i imagine for example that your sony the one that you paid 2500 bucks for how many years ago that likely doesn't have a balanced output maybe it does but let's just say it doesn't and that's okay just put that into the preamp into its single-ended input and then you just have to be careful about the laying of cables and making sure that you're not going to get hum and noise introduced from outside sources and you'll be you'll be just fine but in the future as you move forward try and buy equipment that has balanced out and balanced in because balanced is the best way to go and good luck in losing the weight and thanks for buying my book and have fun i am just excited as hell for you to to have an opportunity a goal something in 2021 that you're gonna go out and make some great music in your home go get em tiger all right thanks for the for the uh thanks for the question and i'll uh i'll talk to you tomorrow bye [Music] [Laughter] [Music] do you

Channel: Paul McGowan, PS Audio

Views: 43,465

Keywords: Ask Paul 3

Id: a_NqnpYnNG4

Length: 5min 43sec (343 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 14 2021