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Be aware of possible gain issues.

Posted by Tony Lauck (A) on May 9, 2012 at 13:09:58

In Reply to: RE: Need RCA - to - XLR - Advice posted by erik on May 9, 2012 at 10:19:23:

Another factor to consider is gain. There are two reasons why connecting an unbalanced RCA to balanced XLR might result in adequate gain and this might be an issue of as much as 20 dB:

1. There is a basic loss of 6 dB in amplitude when using only one side of the balanced input.
2. Most unbalanced sources (e.g. consumer) output lower voltage than balanced sources (e.g. pro).

Even if there is sufficient gain in your preamp there might still be an issue of the preamp clipping before it can drive the amplifier to full power. Whether this will be a problem or not will depend on your speakers, room and how loud you like to listen to music. My powered speakers have two gain settings to accommodate the different standards and the high gain setting has about 20 dB more gain than the low gain setting. I switched my sound card to a balanced pro configuration so that it would better drive my powered speakers in balanced mode and then discovered that the soundcard inputs didn't have enough gain when running with the output of my unbalanced cassette deck.

Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar

• http://www.sengpielaudio.com/calculator-db-volt.htm   (Open in New Window)

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