emusonacid!

So what does everyone use to connect their emu to a mixing desk, Balanced 1/4 jacks, unbalanced jacks, or Jack to XLR on mixing desk.

I have upgraded my cables to eliminate noise I am now using balanced 1/4 jacks going into my Mackie 1604vlz pro, I maybe wish I had gone for jack to xlr! So I would go out of my Emu with a balanced 1/4 jack into the XLR mic inputs on my Mackie.

Any opinions, experience or knowledge would be great!

Deceptive

balanced is important, yes. That way you eliminate some noise.
Else I must say adat is better, 'cause you get 24 bit audio with no noise whatsoever. pluss you only need one cable per 8 out.
and then there's zero latency (light speed) :)

emugonzo wrote:balanced is important, yes. That way you eliminate some noise.
Else I must say adat is better, 'cause you get 24 bit audio with no noise whatsoever. pluss you only need one cable per 8 out.
and then there's zero latency (light speed) :)

I don't have ADAT expansion on my Emu and also I have an analogue mixing desk so I wouldn't be able to use ADAT would I??

D

Come on tell me how you have your EMU'S hooked up!

D

depends how much you wanna spend , 1/4 to 1/4 is more usefull because then you have cables for any machine, if you want to use them for another setup combo, xlr 's are less adaptable to different situations. I use Monster 1/4 bal - 1/4 bal, try to buy the ones with removable metal jackets , so you can re-solder them if they start crackling . They are more expensive, but save time and your sanity. More expensive cables definately sound better especially if they are the gold plated ones , gold is more conductive and does not oxidise , which creates the crackling.
Also the dearer ones have better sheilding which prevents hum from contact with other cables like electric cables, which is really hard to avoid . If you cant stop some cables from touching each other , its best to have them crossing at right angles, never run all your cables tied together audio with electric. Unfortunately people spend all this money on high end gear and then go and buy some plastic cables like HOSA which creates a weak link in your studio.

Balanced 1/4" jacks here - There's no signal/noise advantage in using XLR sockets, although you might get a more robust physical connection. My mixer (Roland VM3100pro) does have a digital input, but at the moment my Focusrite Penta is going into there. And, to be honest, I don't think anyone can really notice the difference between a balanced analog connection and a digital connection - unless it's a bad cable, of course! (Talking about SPDIF here, rather than multi-channel ADAT). With ADAT, what's the use of 24bit audio, when your samples are only 16bit?!?

I have a midrange ($50) 8-cable snake, balanced. Can't remember the brand. Goes into my Mackie 1604-VLZ. Sounds pretty good until I hook up my soundcard, at which point I usually get all sorts of clicks and pops... Luckily I don't use the computer for much.

Same here, I run a couple of studiospares balanced looms with a 1604vlz. The first thing I noticed was how much louder the signal was from the emu. To be honest the 16 mic pres are a bit wasted on me, I only use 1 or 2 max.

I mainly use the 1604 to route all my hardware into the emu for sampling and I think balanced cables is a must for this job. I'm not a big fan of the internal resampling of the emu as I never feel 100% happy with the results - I prefer to take it out to the mackie first, add slight eq/filtering and compression from outboard gear then back into emu.

Just aquired the RFX/ adat , making my life, of course more complicated, being all optical now, how about that MuXster , gotta see what that can do fully. Oh, Wigworld "24bit" is all about headroom, recording your finished 'master' result at 24bit is much better than 16bit.