First, I want to thank all you kind folk who post here.
I have a cable connection dilemma. Sorry its long.
A few days ago I asked what cable gauge would work to wire up a line level monitor send from our FOH console (Mackie CFX20-wanted to use an Aux send). With great kindness and patience, Ivan responded with an answer. Now I'm trying Ivan's and the Board's collective patience. After posting
, I took a look at our snake box and noticed that it had 4 returns, A,B,C,D (2 feeding the mains and 2 unused). See picture below, although ours is about 18 years old, it looks and appears to function the same (same brand too). So I dug around the other end of the snake at the FOH console and found 2 unused return cables buried among the stuff (1 XLR female jack-labeled “C” and 1 TRS male jack-labeled “D”). The 2 returns on the snake feeding the mains are XLR female jacks labeled “A” & “B”. It is apparent to my untrained eye that “D” was likely an XLR female jack that was changed to a TRS male jack. Anyway, I thought this would be good, since we could run an additional monitor mix no problem. No extra cable running needed.
And since we had 2 returns, could switch the monitors (2 of them), which are currently being run off a separate console located at the back corner of the platform, to the FOH console.
For us, running monitors from a separate console has several problems (hey, this was done 18 years ago and not by me, I was only 12 at the time)
1) No one to run the monitor console (18 years ago I guess someone did).
2) Monitor console only has 12 inputs (fed by 12 splitter boxes) and we currently use up to 16 at FOH.
3) When playing soundtracks patched in an open stereo channel at FOH console, no sound through monitors. This makes it difficult for vocalists to hear the soundtrack loud enough to sing along to (without blasting the FOH mains and the congregation).
4) Monitor console is getting old and doesn’t sound that good.
5) A whole host of problems can arise from #1.
Solution: Run the monitors from the FOH console. As a bonus, we could add additional monitor mixes with AUX 2.
The Troubleshooting begins:
Channel “C” trouble. To try “C” I needed an adapter cord for “C’s” XLR female input since AUX send is TRS. So I tried a TRS male to XLR male plug adapter cord into the XLR female “C” return. I had to turn up the AUX send on the channel and the AUX master section to almost the max and then I could hear faint signal from the monitors, same from the AUX 2 jack. Now for the interesting part. Then I plugged a TS jack into AUX with the other end of the TS jack cord going into a Hi-Z to Lo-Z transformer then to “C’s” XLR female jack. And it worked well. I then plugged “C,” XLR female with no adapters, into the console’s main left XLR out and it worked well too, with good signal to the monitors.
To rule out that the TRS male to XLR male cable wasn’t defective, I used it to go from the channel “B” on the snake box TRS out to an XLR cable running to the FOH mains and it worked fine. So I don’t think the TRS male to XLR male adapter cable is defective.
Channel “D” trouble. I plugged the TRS male jack “D” into the AUX 1 and same result as “C” with the adapter cable, very low output volume. Same result in AUX 2. I unplugged the XLR main outs and tried the main TRS out, same result as AUX 1 and 2, very low output volume. Curious, I unscrewed the “D” TRS cable connector and noticed that the wires were White-tip and Yellow-ring with ground to the sleeve. The solder connections looked good. But I don’t know which color is hot and which is cold.
Questions
:
1) Why won’t the TRS male to XLR male adapter cable work with channel “C” return cable when a TS cable converted to balanced then to “C” will?
2) Why won’t TRS channel “D” work, could the TRS male connector be incorrectly wired?
Thanks for making it this far.
