I have never used Elektron products before. And I want my first gear be OT MK2. But I just wanted to make sure for a few things.
First of all, does OT MK2 come with adapter that is suitable for both 110v (US) and 220v (EU)?
The input for my speakers are RCA. And on the specification for OT MK2, it says balanced outputs. Where I can find RCA->TRS cables? Because all I can find is RCA->TS, which makes sense because one RCA has two channels (signal and ground I guess). I am quite concerned about this because I read on reddit that you can damage OT if you use unbalanced cables for balanced output.
And is 80ohm headphone a good choice for OT MK2? What would be best impedance value for headphone to use with OT?
That’s definitely wrong. Why should taking a single channel output (unbalanced) from a dual channel output (balanced) do any damage? When this would be the case the world would be full of damaged machines …
I also read on reddit that the earth is flat and was created a few thousand years ago
any set of headphones will do just fine (earbuds etc from iphone won’t give great sound though lol) , do not worry so much about such things as OHM rating BUT it’s always good to ask
I don’t need amp for my speakers which use RCA cables, and they are active. I am using DT770 80ohm version. Even if it won’t be an issue with 80 ohm cans, I still would love to know what is the optimal impedance for cans for OT. On website, it says headphone output impedance is 55 ohms. How this value is related to cans impedance? Sorry if I am taking the discussion in the different direction. But I think this still might be useful to newcomers like me
There are contexts where connecting balanced to unbalanced can cause problems, possibly damage, but as far as I can tell they’re rare, probably most applicable to older designs, and I’ve never had or heard of an issue in 20 years of mixing the two pretty much without any concern (I’ll even connect balanced to balanced with an unbalanced cable if that’s all I have handy). There is a technical document from, I think, Rane that discusses potential issues to consider when you’re designing large scale PA installations and I think that’s the source of the “unbalanced and balanced aren’t safe to connect” scare stuff that has been going around recently.
This is what I was thinking of. It makes the rounds whenever this topic comes up as proof that mixing balanced and unbalanced connections is dangerous. It’s technically correct, but it’s also from 1985 and since then the home recording revolution happened. Most modern gear is designed to safely handle a variety of signal types and levels, since it could be used in any number of amateur, professional and in-between setups. I’ve been mixing and matching since I got my first portastudio in the mid 90s as a kid and I’ve never once had an issue, not even ground loop hum. If you start using high end studio gear from the 1970s, or playing through large PA systems without a DI for some reason, you’ll probably want to pay more attention to it, but other than that it’s not really an issue in practice.
EDIT: also, the pinout for XLR audio connectors wasn’t actually standardized until sometime in the 80s, so on some older gear, mixers especially, some of the pins are swapped, and that’s another area where mixing and matching could have caused problems back then.
So, from the link, it seems there was some science behind this worrying, but it seems it is not necessary. As you said otherwise the world would be full of damaged machines.