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Post subject: 1/4" TS cable for subwoofer?
Posted: Thu May 26, 2011 5:18 pm
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Hobbyist
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Joined: Tue May 17, 2011 5:47 pm
Posts: 8
Hi, regarding the 1/4" TS cable needed to connect a powered sub to the 500pro, is this just a standard mono cable like a normal guitar lead, or could/should it be a stereo cable?

Many thanks,
Mahavan


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Post subject: Re: 1/4" TS cable for subwoofer?
Posted: Sun Jun 12, 2011 7:30 am
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Aspiring Musician
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Joined: Wed Feb 16, 2011 7:24 am
Posts: 434
Standard mono cable is fine. It should be an instrument cable and not a speaker cable.

TS (Tip/Side) implies mono. TRS (Tip/Ring/Side) is stereo.

Rambling details you can ignore unless you are interested:

[Add that some of this might be wrong. I THINK I understand it, but I might be ignorant.]

The input 1/4" ports can be either TS or TRS, but the output to the subwoofer should just be TS.

Using TRS for input does not mean that you are sending a stereo signal through a single TRS 1/4" cable, however. Basically, there are two unrelated ways to use a TRS 1/4" plug/jack.

For stereo use, one connector is for "ground", and the other two are for the "hot" side of each of the two stereo signals. The two signal lines share the one ground.

If you think of electricity as water, one stereo channel pulses the water into its line and the second stereo channel pulses its water into its separate hot line, and the two share the same drain.

Meanwhile, XLR cables have three conductors used for a completely different scheme. It's similar to the way that your home wiring has a third prong on the plug. It really only needs two prongs to make electrical things work, but the third prong is a safety ground to stop you from being electrocuted if some internal part of your electrical drill gets shorted out against the metal exterior of the drill.

Early rock and roll performers at colosseums had this annoying habit of being electrocuted when they touched their lips to the microphone while touching the strings to their electric guitars, so they added the safety ground to reduce the number of unnecessary fatalities. It also makes the concerts longer when people don't die mid-performance.

Later, people came up with condenser mics that were less expensive than dynamic mics, and they had great sound, but they required batteries. The batteries would go dead in the middle of a performance, so they wanted a way to power those mics without batteries.

They figured out a way to run power through two of the three conductors without disturbing the signal coming from the third conductor. Dynamic mics ignore this power source, but condenser mics use it instead of batteries. That's why they call it phantom power. Only mics that need it can tell that it's there.

So, some amps don't have XLR ports. They only accept 1/4" TS cables. In order to get an XLR mic to work in these amps, you have to go from three conductors to two. This is suboptimal, but it works, like pulling the ground pin from a 3 connector house appliance in order to plug it into an old house with 2 connector wiring. Most of these amps allow a very wide range of input signal levels, so they can handle mic or line level input.

But what if you like the 3 conductor features of XLR, but you want to be able to connect to 1/4" ports on amps when you have to, and you don't want to have to buy more than one cable for your microphone? Well, that's what the 1/4" TRS cable is all about.

You can plug a 1/4" TRS cable into a 1/4" TS port, and the port ignores the ring and treats it like a TS cable. But if your amp has a TRS port, it uses the third conductor. Very clever.

Meanwhile, let's be honest here. This is a kludge. The XLR cable is better. It is handled in a more standard way. You can't use phantom power with it because the process of plugging in and unplugging the cable involves temporarily connecting the wrong conductors to the connectors in the plug. This likely would damage the sound source. So, one of your reasons for wanting a third conductor doesn't work with a TRS cable.

The Fender Passport is another good example of what's wrong with using a 1/4" TRS cable as a faux XLR cable.

They assume that 1/4" cables are connected to line level signal sources like electric guitars or keyboards. If they don't make that assumption, then the vast majority of people using this amp will avail themselves to the error of overwhelming the amp with a line level signal going into a mic level input on the amp. They would have to use the Pad button every time they plug in the most common signal sources for 1/4" ports.

So, Fender was good enough to use TRS for the 1/4" ports in order to respect the rare fact that some people do have a sound source that uses this for a mono signal, but they don't give the option of turning off the Pad button for things coming in through that port. So, microphones plugged in to this port need a preamp or they don't really work. They are not loud enough.

So, for the Fender Passport, a cable that connects an XLR microphone to a TRS 1/4" plug is pretty much useless. You want XLR instead.

The Passport is less confusingly versatile than a lot of more expensive, less portable sound systems. The whole design is brilliantly focused on being high quality, very portable and very easy to use.

More versatile systems often leave amateur engineers frustrated while they try to figure out why the sound sucks so badly because somebody pushed the "stereo/amp1-amp2" button by accident or they have the volume for a single channel cranked really high with the slider at the bottom, but they have the pot turned really low at the top, etc., etc., etc.

The Passport gives you fewer places to screw up.

Meanwhile, reducing your options implies creating a few new places to screw up, like using a 1/4" cable with an XLR microphone. In sound amplification design, everything involves compromise. I love the compromises that Fender chose with this system. It really works for me.


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