Mic Splitters, Patchbays and the Search for Clean Gain

Are only be history. Welcome, Hi, Hi. The Pro Audio Suite. Those guys are professional and motivated with text. The LEO stars George Whittam, founder of Source Element, Robert Marshall, International Audio Engineers, Darren Robbo Robertson and Global Voice Andrew Peters. Thanks to Tribo, Austrian Audio Making Passion, Herd Sauce Elements, George, the tech Wism and Robbo and aps International Demos. Find out more about us check the Pro Audio Suite dot com and welcome to another pro audio suite thanks to Austrian Audio Making Passion heard and I'd like to get one of their T shirts. I mentioned it the other week. I'd like to get a hold of them a super. And get still waiting nice. T shirts to wear on our podcast. What your look snazzy when you do an audio only podcast? Exactly? But it's when you go out she looks snazzy. But I saw them the T shirts they have. They have the OC eight one eight T shirts which look really cool. Oh yes, yeah, it looks good. In fact, I saw a video today. It was a Studio one hundred in Germany who make a lot of kids animation movies, and they were doing a little thing on Insta for Foley, and I looked at it and I swore it was an OC eight one eight, But it turns out it was not. It was annoyment, okay, But at first glance, I went, oh shit, that's an eight one eight. Interesting. I wonder what input they were using, though, uh huh, Well. That's an interesting question. Funny you should mention that because I'm something cross my mind. I've got an ID forty four, which we use including loop back, so I can have four external preamps going into the ID forty four, and then that goes into twisted waves, so I can select which Michael pre amp I want to use, but only two of them are directed in s. The other ones I to use go through the pre amps in the ID forty four, which is channels three and four. But I'm wondering if there is a way or a device that actually gives you four channels without using a preamp, just a switcher. But would that do what I do with my stuff? Well, you're just really just looking for an analog switcher, right, so, and any of the speaker selectors will work in reverse, doesn't really matter. Oh see you when a pat needs to be passive, yeah, correct, and line level and line level passive. Books common speaker switcher. Balance though right, yeah, yeah, which is what I'm using now. The ID forty four has the channel one and channel two here, which is balance line level going in, so I can actually go straight through it without even going anywhere near any of their preamps or anything, and straight into. Here's a rack mount version of it for more money. But no, I found something. I found one called the Heritage Audio Synth Buddy Stereo desktop switch. The face panel looks like it just has a big toggle, not toggle, a rotating switch so it can go from input one all the way to input ten and then on. So it's got ten pairs of TRS inputs and then one pair of TRS outputs, so. And it probably works, so yeah. And then the one I paced it, there's a Coleman with push buttons, and then Coleman makes another one that's new. It's one hundred and fifty bucks and it's three inputs to one. But those are stereo funny enough, because those are a speaker sure boxes, so they all do it in the stereo. But you've also got to have a USB out, so I can USB out of the device into the computer. Oh so you still need an AD convert so. It's an ID converter as well. Yeah, you're just going to go into your audience. If not, you're looking for a Vio passport with the two microphones that let you switch. But you want four exactly, Maybe I've got two. I've got two passport videos. Yeah, you can probably need six of them going to get your form onne. Oh my god. Yeah, that's not sensible. But you can do it with just you know, if you want to do it in your audience and not use the extra channels of your audience, you can do it. I can do it by currently. But the two other inputs one I use the talk back, which I'm using in fact, that's what I'm using right now because I'm sitting out out of the booth. And the other one is just another mic that's set up in the booth. Yeah, but both of those go through the pre amps in the audience, right. But the other two that I use for my work, which is the Grace and the Neve, they go through the direct D. You know, there's precious few sound cards. Let's call them that because that's what they've always called them. There's precious few sound cards anymore that are just analogue line level. I O input. I have an echo audio fire too, and my box are junk and it's a fire wire device with a pair of trs ns and a pair of trs outs and that's all. It is, just a little There is a company. There is a company makes a little tiny box that it's got like eight in and they're just they're just balanced inputs. What's the name of it. I don't know. That's the hard Bart's finding this. Do you know. The weirdest thing is I've got in my old PC which being made for me, I have the RME PCI card, but I've also got a four channel splitter. Oh yeah, that's because that's how I used to run that thing. I used to run everything into the four channel splitter and then into the PCI card. But it was total mix, which was a total mind fuck. So it's a good card. I mean, it's a good card. You could put that card in a in a thunderbolt enclosure and turn it into a thunderbolt probably make more sense, frankly, to get a I think it's called the Apollo twin X four because it's got four. Yes, okay, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, look at yes, I. Is there stuff any good? It's supposed to be actually very good. I thought, Okay, it's a German company that's made it's Chinese but made it's Germany. Yeah. Yeah, but they make like super small interfaces and just no frills. Yeah, they're making like those problem solver kind of little gadgets that yeah, stop kind of disappeared because again Echo Audio was making cool stuff. They were making all these little problem solving line and line out things for FireWire back in the day. And that's pretty much dead. Well that's dead. I mean unless you have an old Mac that still speaks firewaar. FireWire died with what mojave was the first thing? Well, no, they officially left it a little while ago, but you you had to get FireWire to thunderbowl adapters. But now Apple has completely after recent OS upgrade, it's completely removed FireWire from the brain, not just the ports of the computer. Right. Well, the yeah, it's now over over with. So I'm seeing the Maya and yes, I have a. Lot of good FireWire interfaces too. It's really sad, no, I know, it's it's everything's going the way the Dodo bird. When it comes to obsolescence, it's yeah, it's frustrating. Like I watched a video the other day of a guy extolling the amazing value of an old of a twenty fourteen trash can Mac Pro twenty thirteen or twenty thirteen. Yeah, like the value that. Because the thing that's been a big buzz right now is that all computer hardware is going through the freaking roof roof. Yes, storage memory is all gone batshit, like absolute batchit thanks to AI and compute being you know, all the demand right now, it's gone bonkers. So like you know, you ever seen dy Perks, the British guy. He's awesome. He makes really cool stuff. But his latest thing was building a custom made PC that fits in a wooden bezel. You have to watch it, but he actually extracts an iMac screen from an old iMac that would be obsolete literally, no one wants these Imax. He extracts the display, puts it in a wooden frame and then mounts the inners of a Windows PC laptop, a gaming laptop with like an Nvidia card in it. A badass and he makes this amazing desktop computer with an old IMAX screen that's retina and has thirty two gigs of DDR five RAM, which right now costs more the RAM costs more than all the parts he bought to build this, including the screen. I mean, that's just where we're at right now. Wow, tangent anyway, Esi maya forty four were might be what it is that you want. But it's not an analog switcher though. It's just four and four out us P, yeah, which is kind of what you need. And then you just set up some kind of loop back. But I like, you still need like a you still need a software solution that to go between from your audio hardware and the rest of the world, which again Nexus could do that, so you don't mind still using Nexus and as a middleman between them. Richie set up this computer and he set it up with loop back, so that was kind of the same thing anyway. But oh, I see the loop back software right. Yeah, So I've got loop back software that comes off the back of the audience, so it all so I can actually instead of it sort of just logging into one and two, I've got it in twenty one twenty two, so that that means I can move around inside the audience. Uh huh, interesting, would you prefer? So is the goal to eliminate the audience completely? Well, look, I'm curious more than anything, because but the audience works fine. But I'm just kind of thinking if someone's doing the same thing as me, which I doubt very much, but just in case. Well, the more audio healed, hi, you know, the more well healed audio. People that have a lot of out board gear would be more interested in this for sure. Yeah, I mean it's not like crazy, but I use the grace and the need for me, So that's like promo and you know, commercial or narration whatever. And then I have another one set up in the LA which I set up for Somerset because I can move the MAC around instead of adjusting mine and then going in there and going why does it sound funny because make's in the wrong spot. And then I have this out here for the talkback, so I can actually if she's doing a session. I can use talkback. I can talk to her or talk to if we're doing something down the line and the engineer at the other end wants to talk about levels and stuff, I can communicate with them. World's most expensive back mic, Yes, the. Easiest thing to do is just get a thirty dollars patch bay. Like all this like switcher stuff and everything else. You could just put a patch bay up, have your mics go to it, and have your pre amps be on the output or you know, like on the bottom of it. And then the other part of the patch bay it could be the pre ams going out to your sound card going in, and then you can do whatever the hell you want whenever you want, but the patch bay will be normal to do what you wanted to do. Normally half normal, yeah, yeah, and then you use like the channel one and two on the audience. Is that what you're saying. Yeah, you just use channel one and two in the audience. So you got you got your like five mics or having mics you ca have coming in on the top. Then you got your preamp inputs on the bottom, and you would just put whichever ones you want a default. You put them, you know, line them up with each other, and then you have your preamp outputs on the top of the next kind of row over and then on the bottom of that you put the audience input and a couple patch cables really just two patch cables, and you can. I just three mile patch by out you could have add. It literally pose people toss them. Yeah, I mean the only downside with a quarter inch patch base is they can get a build up of corrosion on the contacts, and so you occasionally have to twist them around. Yeah, I clutch better than the corrosion that picks up on a cheap piece of Chinese switcher gear. Yeah, just give them a clean regularly. Yeah. It's also really interesting living down here too, because because it's so salty, because I'm right by the ocean, I'm always conscious of the fact with things like that corrosion and stuff. Yeah, that would be your downside. You just have to exercise that You're gonna have to occasionally, just like a headphone jack yet twist twist. Yeah, not the end of the world. I'll praise some contact cleaner around there and just plug it in a few times, and yeah, do that once or twice a year. I think you might be right, I mean, because everything else will just be an over engineered and probably really expensive workaround to just doing a patch bay. Yeah, you know. But the other on the other on the other side of the thing is does it really matter anyway with that channels three and four using the audient pre amp as well. Oh yeah, that doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. Well, if you ask the designer of the passport vo it doesn't because. Well it's funny, is that? Yeah? Who is that? Yeah, he's that guy. It's funny because you look at like all the or you know, the modern mixing desks that had twenty four bus outputs to be able to hit twenty four channels of the tape deck, and then in a way, none of that bussing on the console matters anymore in a sense because now when you're in pro Tools, you can just pick any input from pro Tools as your input to that channel. So we'll create a new one. Right, you have a bunch of direct outs on your board going into your Approach Tools system, and then you picked your channel on your Approach Tool system. You don't need all this buzzing on a big you know, twenty four bussing desk that you had back in the day. Yeah, yeah, yeah, well yeah, basically that's what the audience does. I found a Broadcast tools you know, a matrix switcher, So you know matrix switchers can do you know a variety of ins and out routing and then. It can send one thing to multiple places. And yeah, the matrix, the broadcast tools ACS forty four G two forty four point four G two is stereophour in too, stereophour out, and it's a matrix. So you can send you can choose two inputs, take them and send them to two other outputs. For example, they can do more complex routing. It's probably not what you need, but you know, something like that, it's going to be about a thousand bucks US right, yeah, four in four out overkill, you know. And then and then all the because it's for broadcast, all the udio inputs are either punch block or RJ forty five, so it's you have to get all different cables and adapters to plug it into your home studio. I stand by the patch baby. Yeah, it's the simplest, It does what you need. And yeah, like I love the gold Digger and the cherry Picker. I actually did set up both of those for a client of mine. At one point he had more than two pre amps and then we had more than two destinations. No, I'm sorry, he had more than two mics and more than two pre amps. Yep, So he wanted you to take any mic and send it to any pre amp, but then it went to the same input channel in the doll all the time. We didn't we never chose anything other than input one. Yeah, it was okay, that was simple. We didn't have to you know, could he do a loop back with that? No? Or or you just get the opposite thing. You get the gold digger on the front, so you can pick any any mic for any pre amp and then you pick and then you have the switcher on the output of the pream, so you can send any pream to any input. Yeah. I think it is like switch everything again. Thousand ship you can do with the past thousands of. Dollars to do the same thing. That's a patch back, Yeah, I agree. Okay, so maybe maybe splash out and get a T T patch bay. That's gonna be a little bit more on the set up unfortunately. Yeah, because the back of them are a punch down block or. Well there's a variety they got. They got t T patch bas that go to d sub, So those are pretty easy. That's part of the easiest type to deal with. It's just it's just you know, you get your snake and it's d SUB and fans out to eight x l rs. The sub is like a twenty five pin connector that looks akin to a printer, an old printer. It's the old scuzzy, scuzzy, an old susy connector. And then yeah, that became a standard. I think, didn't task have something to do with that standard? Yeap taskim it's literally called like task AMSPEC or whatever. I think they're on the DA eighty eights, et cetera, back in the day, and so down you have like that one jack in and then fan out to eight connectors. Right, and so the downside of those is that you don't have quite as much flexibility, but they have they have ones that are they have ones that are uh what's that company? Uh? I forget. But but basically the back of the patch base like like a little molex looking connector, so you can patch the batch of the back of the patch bay, which is what I have. But the problem is like the crimping tool to make those things or like three hundred bucks. And that's kind of the beauty of the quarter runch patch base, as annoying as they are, because the problem with the courter runch patch base is they're inevitably made by Bearinger and so they work, but they can just be I don't know, stupid. Like for instance, I've got a Bearinger that they put all the normally switches on the top of it. Yeah, I remember the and that's. Great until you have to pull the thing out of the rack and then all the switches get switched and you're like, how did I have my patch base set up? What channels are normal? What we're half normal? Which we're not normal at all? Like the other ones I've used, the each pair of inputs is a module or a card and can you overlip it over? But you can't do it on the fly at all. You have to completely disassemble the thing. I mean, you're not going to do all that. You're going to set it up once. You're gonna have somebody that knows what they're doing help you choose your normal lying and all that stuff, and then you'll never touch it. But again, the. Biggest failure of all the like like like like what I was gonna say is the biggest filure with all the quarterrunch patch bases. Inevitably, if you have to like pull the thing out of the rack, ye, all the quarter inch patches on the back of it'll just pull out and you're like, ah, so you guys have to make them so that you have enough slack to really pull them out safely. Yeah, And then and then they work, and they're just like I mean, they're so dumb that they're hard to screw up, right, Yeah, A four quarter inch in the back, corn inch in the bat in the front. Like, yeah, I had those. I didn't know that. I didn't know what I was getting into when I bought those and put them in my recording remote truck. And that was they were problematic because just driving around the vibration hitting bumps would eventually work some of those TRS connectors out of the back of the pack. Really yeah, and so I don't grip, they don't grip. Well, that's the that's the flaw is that like, like, once you get them set up, they're great. But if you if you're crawling behind your rack and you pull that thing, you get you get that half connection, you know how, like a quarter runchll out and then nightmare. Yeah, and you're doing twenty four tracks of recording and you have one or two channels for being fun. You're reaching behind the patch like, so are you constantly are you constantly chasing phase ers and ship with ship like thatppening. Or losing half of the legs of your balance signals? Yeah, unless you're unless you're disturbing your cabling. Like I can definitely see how those courtunch patchways are not ideal for like a live rack because it's this quarter inch cord wunch and gripped. They don't stand extreme, not like an x l R. Yeah, you know it doesn't. Well, I mean, as I said, I just got rid of mine. I used to have a up until about six months ago. I used to have a Bantam one like the smaller, and it was a different. Yeah. Tts quarter inch are almost the same. It's like a giant looking t T. Those are well made though. Those are pro level. Yeah, those are broadcast ones. All my studio gear came out when I was at George Pats years ago. They moved. We're talking like two thousand here. I bought everything out of the studio for like three grand I got a mixer and a patch bay and all the wiring and all that. Sort of shit. And so Terry Fog, who built that studio originally came and sort of customized it all from my place years ago, and so I've always sort of carried it around, but only recently got rid of everything. I mean it even still got look check this out. Nice view meters swinging needles. Was it. The Yamaha not seven V? What was the bigger one? O? Two? Are? That's still that's still like the twenty four bit forty yeah, yeah, yeah, with all the reverbs and two reverb units and all that sort of shit inside it. So yeah, I mean I sold that years ago, far out fifteen years ago for it lost ale value, yeah, but kept all the kept all the wiring and the headphone amps and all that sort of stuff, and only recently got rid of all those only because I just wasn't using them anymore. Well, and I don't need them anymore too. I mean I've got the road caster with four headphone amps in it, you know, So it's like, well, yeah. In terms of cost a Bantam twenty two forty eight patch bag, yeah, with L DAK, I DAK or Alco connectors in the back. These are a really big many pin connectors. These things are too grand for one. Dak is also the small one that I was talking about. Yeah, like like if you're buying patch Base, they are expensive because they're all cleaned up and ready to go. But yeah, if it's funny how patch bays go, the ones I like the best or the one hundred and forty four point patch Base, I have to normal the rows and then one unnormal the row below them. U. But yeah, nurse, I think I do have a radial balance splitter. I just popped in the booth to look and see what the hell it was. But I used that for the forty one six. So I can either run it into the Macminie out here, or I can run it through the passport VO into the Macneo. So if I'm doing it, yeah, you were saying, or using the passport VO. Yeah, yeah, I use it, And I just think we're doing phantom through that. The phantom is actually out here, so the phantom will be on the grace and I don't use the phantom on those passport. And the passport Yeah, yeah, so you're doing a pass I you know what? Like I do that all the time, George. I have to record like a concert twenty four channels or more, and I have the big passive splitter, and everyone's like, oh no, you got to use a transformer, right, I had to chat if you want to break your back, And they do add noise, and nine times, freaking ninety nine times out of one hundred, you split that mic passively and there's no noise. And the one time you get a little bit of noise, you just get one of those sure barrel connectors that has the transformer in it. Right for that one pop boom. Now you've isolated that the one. Empty. I can tell you that was the one that was always a yeah, fucking pain in my ass. And then you're not lugging a billion freaking transformers and all the weight. Yeah, I had that that. I mean, I liked it because the front of house guys didn't usually freak out when I would whip that thing out on stage and say I'm plugging your MIC's into this first. You know, they were That's true. They do get all the really nice places. Just have that on the wall already. Yeah, that's true. Like the splitter. And how split. I do know how to freak people out. If you want to whip something out on stage, I. Bet you do, sir, You've been around the block. Excuse me what I whip this out? Ding dumb matron. Well, you know the splitter thing, you could just have passive splitters, because as long as you shut off the pre amps are not using, you could actually feed three pre's into this passive splitter. Just run three in and one run one out to your AD converter. You don't care as long as you will have the others shut off. Right, you're not going to have a mix of signal going in. Yeah, no, might you might be making a little bit of a radio antenna here and there, but if you're well grounded, it's not going to make a Yeah. Well I'm not well grounded, but hopefully the right he'll ease. Yeah, but no, I think Look, I think I've solved the problem anyway, because I do use the the forty one six and an OC eighteen that goes into the possible video in the booth, and that runs into the neo which is in the booth. So if you're doing a session like that, then that's fine. Well, yeah, simple is better sometimes. Yeah, I know, I know you're dragged, kicking and screaming into the simple solutions, but you know it's just sometimes it's so much easier and it's pure. The signal is clean. The clean gain is what we all you know, crave and we just don't want complications. Yeah, but I can make it complicated. Yeah. Just listen to the rewind the episode and listen to it again right exactly, and try to follow what we just talked about. Good luck. The audio Sweet and Austrian audio recorded using Source Connect, edited by Andrew Peaters, mixed by Rovo. Got your own audio issues, just ask Rovo dot com. Text report from George the Tech Window. Don't forget to subscribe to the show and join in the conversation on our Facebook group to leave a comment, suggest a topic, or just say today, drop us a note at our website audio site dot com