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Post subject: Passport venue outputs
Posted: Mon Sep 24, 2018 12:15 pm
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Good day all.

I want to connect KRK ROKIT 5 G3 monitor to Passport Venue and I'm having some difficulties figuring out how.
KRK is very informative on input connections (unbalanced RCA and balanced TSR as well as XLR) but I cannot find any info on Passport Venue outputs apart from the fact that 1 is 1/8 stereo/phones jack and the other is 1/4 mono jack. Are they balanced or unbalanced?

How to hook up these two devices in proper manner (what is best option)?

And, yea, I am rather a newbie in this field.


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Post subject: Re: Passport venue outputs
Posted: Wed Sep 26, 2018 6:00 am
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I'd strongly expect the 1/4" output port on the Venue to be 1/4" TS unbalanced.

1/4" TRS balanced is a rare feature in sound equipment. Most balanced connections use XLR. Most 1/4 TRS is unbalanced stereo (like headphones).

The main difference between balanced and unbalanced is that a balanced cable has shielding that an unbalanced cable lacks, so you can have a longer cable without much signal loss or environmental noise gain. Unbalanced cables are best kept around 20' long or less. Balanced cables can run hundreds of feet without a problem.

The Venue, like all of the Passports (except the old P-250 in its least understood mode of operation) was not really designed for use with monitors. You can have a mono version of the house mix with the 1/4" line level output, which should work fine for your monitor, but there is no separate monitor mix, so you can't have the guitar louder in the monitor, and the voice louder in the house mix. You get one mix for both.

The design is to keep things simple for people not accustomed to dealing with the complexity of a modern sound system, and it is a beautifully simple design that serves that purpose well. By design, you place the speakers behind the performers, up on stands, off to the sides, so the performers hear themselves in the main speakers. Just don't aim the speakers directly at the mics, so you don't feed back. Otherwise, those two speakers provide all the sound for everybody. That's the design.

It's quick to set up, easy to adjust the mix with a useful, if not extremely versatile range of adjustments for volume, EQ, and maybe a little reverb, and that's it. Pros want more control over the sound, and with that control, they get a level of complexity that baffles people new to sound amplification, so, since you say you are new to this, you are exactly the person who should own the Venue.

Likely, you will follow one of two paths:

1. You are happy with what the Venue gives you and you use it for the rest of your musical performance career or hobby.

2. You start wanting more, so you add monitors, and maybe a subwoofer, and then, well, you wish you could have separate monitor mixes for people, or that you could have the system memorize the mix for different band setups, or you'd like some compression and gate, or maybe parametric EQ or 31 band EQ, or...

... and you outgrow the Passport and get something else.

Even if you follow the second path, the Venue is a great starting point. Enjoy it.


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Post subject: Re: Passport venue outputs
Posted: Wed Sep 26, 2018 7:40 am
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Rereading what I wrote, I feel I failed to stress the most important point:

Even if you follow the second path and go on to be a professional sound guy operating tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars worth of gear, providing sound for large venues... you have to start somewhere. You need experience adjusting a limited range of parameters to make the sound as good as you can figure out how to make it.

Complex systems have too many variables to learn all at once. The Passport design eliminates most of the complexity and leaves you with the most important variables at your fingertips with a simple physical interface so that you can make adjustments and experience the results. This is crucial to your education as a sound guy.

Get experience running the Venue. Adding a monitor is not a bad thing, but recognize that it adds to the quantity of gear you haul around and the complexity of the setup. If you are comfortable with that, great, but don't let the monitor distract you from getting the house mix sounding good for the audience. If you are not one of the critical performers, go out and hear the sound in the room you are playing to and hear the quality of the sound, and tweak it to learn how to improve that sound, not just from one spot, but from all around the room.

Learn about the compromises you have to make to provide an acceptable minimum quality of sound for everyone in the room there to listen to it, and then once you find the range of sound that leaves for you to work with, hone in on the best sound for the most people. You can't make the sound great for everybody. You have to compromise, and balance those compromises.

Place the speakers too low and people near the speakers block the treble sound (which moves line of sight) from people farther away. Place the speakers too high, and people near the speakers can't hear the treble because it is directed over their heads. Instead, they hear the treble reverberating off the back wall, a little later than the rest of the sound that is in their face.

Crank the volume too loud and you hurt the people nearest the speakers. Pull the volume down too far, and people in the back can't hear. So, you find that point that is kind of loud close to the speakers and kind of quiet for the people in the back. The smaller the venue, the closer you can let people get to the speakers. If the venue is larger, you need to raise the speakers higher, crank up the volume AND prevent people from getting close enough to the speakers to either be deafened, or have the sound go over their heads, then return to them from the back wall, garbled and out of phase.

Place mics too far away from the sound source, and you get room noise, feedback, and no punch or presence from the sound source. Place mics too close and you get too much pop, boom, string noise, etc., and if the performer makes very slight changes in the distance from the mic, the volume level massively changes. You have to find the balance point among the compromises to make the best sound your gear and the performers can produce.

If you ARE one of the performers and you can't walk around and listen, find a friend whose ears and taste you trust and have them walk around and listen and come back to you with suggestions for what might improve the sound. More or less volume. More or less of a particular instrument or voice in the mix. More treble for crispness (or less treble to be less harsh) or more bass for punch (or less bass to be less muddy), or more or less reverb (like salt in food, there's definitely a point where too much is too much, and just the right touch is crucial, and for a lot of dance music, ZERO reverb improves the clarity of the beat, especially if the room produces its own reverb), etc.

Monitors improve the experience for the performers, but aside from improving the quality of the performance because the performers can hear themselves better, monitors do nothing for the house, except introduce more opportunities for feedback, exaggeration of reverb, etc., all of which you need to learn to control.

And that's the next step in complexity. Increases in control and features implies increases in complexity. It really is best to start out simple and REALLY learn how to control a simple system well, and THEN start adding versatility and complexity, so that when you hear something that isn't quite right, you have a much clearer sense of which knob to turn or what mic or speaker or monitor to move, or when to add compression and gate, or where and how much to adjust EQ, or which mic to use, or what cable to replace, etc.

Start simple. Learn.

Add a little complexity. Learn. Add a little complexity. Learn. Rinse, repeat.


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Post subject: Re: Passport venue outputs
Posted: Wed Sep 26, 2018 11:40 am
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Thank you very much for all the info and for your insight. All you wrote makes sense to me. Since this setting is ment for non professional use, I want to have it as simple as possible. As there is a lack of space and we cannot set speakers behind us, a small monitor is the only option with all its minuses.
As for the future, only God knows where it'll go. :)


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Post subject: Re: Passport venue outputs
Posted: Thu Sep 27, 2018 6:04 am
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Best of luck in the endeavor.

The Passport is basically a gateway drug to sound amplification. It lets you learn and stretch yourself. It's really useful as a very portable way to bring live or prerecorded sound to a decent sized room. Once you know how to do that well, you start seeing the limits that, as a person new to sound equipment aren't really limits yet, and depending on what you are trying to do, maybe it will never be a limit.

Meanwhile, once you get started, you bump into ideas that require flexibility (and complexity) that the Passport doesn't have.

I mean, really? Different people in the same band want to hear a different mix in the monitors? "I want to hear more me in the monitor," and everybody has a different "me".

I mean, really? You can get a graph of frequencies to see where the spike is that is causing the feedback overlayed onto a 31 band equalizer to notch out the specific frequency in a couple seconds? Or maybe just have the feedback automatically cancelled?

I mean, really? You can automatically level out the volume on a performer who can't stop themselves from wrecking the mix by ignoring distance from a mic or volume of a performance?

I mean, really? You can put in a second pair of speakers half way down the hall and delay the signal to them so that a person in the back of the hall hears sound from both sets of speakers at once instead of hearing the mid-hall speakers first, because sound travels so slow you'd otherwise hear a kind of muddy reverb?

Really? Vocal mics are different from instrument mics?

Speaker cables are different from instrument cables? But they LOOK alike. Either one plugs into the jack. What difference does it make which one you use?

Really? You can walk around the room with an iPad and adjust the sound wirelessly?

Really? You can digitally record to a hard drive a separate track for each channel on the mixer so you can change the mix in the recording later, or so you can set up in a new hall and adjust levels before the band shows up?

Really? Speaker arrays throw sound to people farther away without blowing out the people up close?

But it all starts with two speakers and a powered mixer that clip together into a suitcase, some mics and cables and a power strip with a long cord on it. The Passport is a beautiful little sound system, with a design focused like a laser on the critical stuff you need to make a small sound available to a larger audience.

I have two of them; a 300 and a 500. I haven't used them in years, but I can't bring myself to let go... I know there's going to be a gig somewhere that they'll be so much easier to use than the carload of overpowered, overly complex gear they would replace, and I have two mixers I'd ditch before I'd ditch the Passports.

It would be like ditching my Nintendo 64. I'm sure I'm going to play it again, someday. [sigh]


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Post subject: Re: Passport venue outputs
Posted: Fri Sep 28, 2018 1:45 am
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WOOOW.
I understand all you wrote. And all makes perfect sense, apart from the lookalike cables. :) I do have some knowledge in electricity/signals/telco/networking field, but would expect cables to have some distinct names/markings.
Guess they might have different electrical characteristics or difference in how they are interwoven (I hope it's the right term. I'm not a native English speaker.) etc.
Are there? How to distinct them? Which cables are for which purpose?

Honestly, some things you pointed out, would never cross my mind. For the next few years at least.

Thank you!


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Post subject: Re: Passport venue outputs
Posted: Fri Sep 28, 2018 9:46 am
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The speaker cables that come with your Fender Passport have 1/4" TS (Tip/Sleeve) plugs at each end. The internal wiring has two relatively thick wires. They have to be thick in order to carry the amperage needed to drive the magnets that make the speaker cones pump in and out to produce sound.

Sometimes speaker cables like this have cable that looks like the wire on an extension cord, since that's basically what it is. Sometimes, they wrap it in a fat rubber sheath to make it neater and less likely to crimp.

So, to be clear, speaker cables tend to either be fat enough that they don't bend beyond a fairly large radius, or they tend to "remember" any crimp they've been in, the way that extension cords do. Instrument cables are more flexible -- more like handling string, and less like handling heavy rope or pipe cleaners.

There's no need for electrical sheathing for speaker cables, since the signal inside the wire is so powerful that no magnetic pulse in the room (from fluorescent lights or microwave ovens or transformers in power bricks, etc.) could possibly interfere with the signal going through that wire, short of a nearby nuclear explosion, perhaps. Similarly, length is not a problem for speaker cables.

Also, given the amperage level carried by the cable, you don't have to worry about "capacitance" in the wires. The wire doesn't temporarily store electricity enough to screw up the timing of the signal going through the cable, when used as a speaker cable.

An instrument cable also has a 1/4" TS plug at each end, but the wires connecting them are dramatically thinner, and they are usually twisted around each other, because the signal running between an electric guitar and its amp, or between a piano synthesizer keyboard and the mixer, or any other "line level" signal path is a many, many, MANY times weaker signal. Pump the kind of amperage through them that needs to run between your Venue powered mixer and the speakers, and the wire will heat up, and the signal will be weaker because the wire can't handle that much amperage. It provides too much resistance, hence the heat, and in extreme cases, it could catch fire.

If, instead, you use your speaker cable to connect an instrument to a line-level input on the mixer, then there's too much metal in the cable's wires. The signal quality is hurt because of the capacitance of the metal. It's like you are at opposite ends of a swimming pool and someone is dripping water onto the far end of the pool with an eyedropper and you are trying to count the ripples caused by this at your end of the pool. Not a good plan.

Decent quality cables will be marked "speaker" or "instrument" along the cable, or you can unscrew the head on the plug and look at the ends of the wires inside the cable where they solder on to the plug. It it looks like the wires in an extension cord, it's a speaker cable. If it looks like the "twisted pair" wires one uses for land line telephones, it's an instrument cable.

Some instrument cables are fat because manufacturers figure that if they put a fat rubber sheath around a skinny pair of wires, customers will look at it and figure, "Hey, this feels nice and heavy. I bet that means it's a better cable," and will buy it instead of the other manufacturer's thinner cable. Isn't marketing wonderful? Capitalism at its finest.

If you really can't tell whether it is a speaker cable or an instrument cable, throw it away and buy one that is more clearly indicative of what kind of cable it is. A lot of electric guitar cables have woven cloth sheaths and are very flexible. Stiffer, fatter cables tend to be speaker cables.

Also, if the cable is 100' long, it's a speaker cable. Instrument cables rarely reach 20' long because long instrument cables act like an antenna and pick up magnetic room noise. Most instrument cables vary from about 17' to patch cables a foot or less long. Speaker cables are typically tens of feet long.

The reason that XLR cables exist is that they use a third connector for a metal woven sheath around the thin pair of wires that carry the signal. This carries the same kind of signal as the instrument cable a much longer distance before magnetic room noise becomes a problem. XLR cables can be over a hundred feet long and still work fine, and you can chain together multiple XLR cables with no problem.

They all have male (three protruding prongs inside a shell) plugs at one end and female (three holes) plugs at the other. The signal travels from the female end to the male end, which is why you can string them together. Think of the little prongs as arrow heads pointing in the direction of the signal from the source to the target.

They also can carry much weaker signals at "mic" level.

"Line level" is an arbitrary standard that people settled on as appropriate for an electronic signal in sound gear. Mixers take line level inputs and mix them and modify them with various electronic stuff and then sends the result, still at line level, to the power amp. The power amp makes the signal more powerful so it can drive speakers. The wattage level is arbitrary for speakers, so you'll see various speakers rated for different wattage. Plug a 500 watt speaker into a 5,000 watt power amp, and you will probably destroy the speaker.

The power amp built into your Passport matches the speakers. That's part of the design you get with the package.

Dynamic microphones have tiny electric generators built into them, driven by the in-and-out movement of the tiny diaphragms (similar to speaker cones) inside. This is much weaker than a line level signal, so mixers have "pre-amplifiers" built in to bring the mic level signal up to line level just before it goes into the mixer. The mixer can mix input channels for inputs at both mic and line level because they turn on pre-amplifiers for the mics and they turn off (or bypass) preamplifiers for the line-level inputs.

On your Passport, you have a "Pad" button on each channel, so you can use the pre-amp for microphones plugged into your XLR ports (with Pad off), or you can plug in line level sound sources into XLR ports (with Pad on). The Passport assumes that anything you plug into a 1/4" jack is line level, even with Pad off, because microphones nearly all use XLR cables. While a lot of line level sound sources use 1/4" TS cables, some use XLR so they can use longer cables. That's why you need to be able to turn off those pre-amps for some devices.

If the sound on something you plug into one of the Passport's XLR input is way too loud, even with the volume turned down, it's time to push that Pad button. Otherwise, you'll generally want Pad turned off.

I don't know why I wrote all this. I'm in a mood, I guess.


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Post subject: Re: Passport venue outputs
Posted: Fri Sep 28, 2018 10:34 am
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You are like an encyclopedia to me - it's noticeable that you have loads of field experience. And you write on "human" level (not the high tech terms), that it's easily understandable and makes sense.

I'm very grateful for it.

I just ordered KRK Rokit 6 G3 and some cables. Thnx to you, I was able to determine what to buy.


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