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Posts: 3532
Joined: Oct. 20 2003
From: Phoenix, AZ
XLR stereo question
So, I have a steady this summer, and they have a pretty good in-house system. Bunch of little JBL speakers up in the rafters, and one XLR input on the wall. I played there last week using a mixer, one-half of the mains going to the XLR. Does it matter that I am only using one half? Or should I get some kind of adapter (I imagine a cord with two XLR female going into one XLR male). I am using a guitar going into a normal instrument line, it's not a stereo channel. On the other hand, for break music, I do use an mp3 player, which presumably is playing stereo tracks.
Anything panned in stereo will suffer...but you can alter you mixer board output to "mono" in which case, everything goes left...there will be no paning picture through the house but at least you won't lose "right side" sounds from the entire sound.
The input on the wall might be an unbalanced stereo XLR and you might be feeding it with a balanced mono signal... or maybe it has nothing to do with this.
You can either pan everything to 0 (center) and use either L and R main outs since both will have the same audio information or pan everything left or right and use the corresponding L or right main out. Most of the time XLR inputs are just balanced mono inputs in rare case they are stereo.
I can see how that would work for the mono inputs like guitars or mics. What about the mp3 player output? If the pan was at 0, would it still send identical information to either side? I am imagining something like Led Zeppelin which has these crazy pan effects in the recordings and what would happen in that situation.
If your input is mono there's no way you would maintain stereo separation.
I might be missing something but... there's only one XLR input and it only sends sounds to one side? Either it's a stereo input or there's something that's not correctly setup in there.
my mp3 player outputs in stereo and I usually plug it into a stereo input (1/8" to RCA)
What I meant is that you won't maintain the stereo separation out of your mixer into that wall input. It will be a mono sum so you have to be careful and mono check your mixes in the mp3 player if you haven't already.
That's kind of the point of this thread, how to get the music out of the mixer into that single XLR without dropping content.
That's what I thought but it got confusing along the way and there's still a few questions that remain unanswered so I can't fully understand what's that input on the wall.
Either way, if it really is a mono in you have to check your stuff in your mp3 or you'll risk having things sounding weird or instruments disappearing completely. Then again, if it is a mono in, why does it only plays on one side?
I don't think he said that it plays on one side. He said: "I played there last week using a mixer, one-half of the mains going to the XLR" meaning that he just plugged either the L or R main out to the XLR input. At least that is what I understand. But maybe I'm wrong.
Then it will depend on your panning/balancing available on your mixer but if your using an aux input for the mp3, then it's either left or right and you'll have to get it in mono before you output to that wall. Anyway, check the available panning options on your mixer, if it has dual panning or something similiar it's easy to get mono.
Yeah, my mixer has a L and R out channel, and I just used one XLR out to the plug in the wall. I don't really know anything about the plug in the wall.
I only played one set, and the manager said there was a good sound. Myself, I couldn't hear anything from those house speakers, but I had brought my K10 and used it for a monitor. By the way, that just about got me hooked on monitors! So much more fun than sitting next to my amp and listening to a bunch of bass mush or straining to hear anything at all from house speakers in the rafters!
If that input on the wall is stereo, then you can look for a solution to grab L & R from your mixer independently. If it's just a mono in, you have to sum the signals. I don't know the pan law of your mixer but the idea is that if your mp3 player is the only stereo signal, then you could turn it into mono before it goes into your mixer. This way you could just choose one output from your mixer and be done with it.
got it. Other mixers have a bridge mono switch to channel everything through left side main out...your's doesn't. MikeC had best idea to split the output of mp3 to two MONO channels, using that splitter. But that would use up two channels you might need. One option is to use your own speaker (I thought you were already) on right side main out, and the other side, left, out to the house, so the stereo split ends up being half house, half your own monitor. The other option is to say WHO CARES ABOUT MP3 music anyway, it's just background so go ahead and lose the right side or whatever.
He should still mono check the end result or use some appropriate software (or plugins) to make sure that the mono mixdown doesn't lose important frequencies or whole instruments.
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