I’m a bit of a stickler when it comes to noise. I spent a lot of time getting the setup I wanted to play guitar without the pickup noise and I stay balanced as much as possible in the studio. I kind of reworked my setup and I’m running a 12 channel balanced snake over to my elektron gear. I think it is 15ft. Anyway the inputs on the digitakt are unbalanced so while it worked ok, when I hit the sample button and there is silence, I don’t want that indicator jumping around. Just running unbalanced 15ft introduces a fair amount of noise in my studio. So my solution was a radial box just before the digitakt. Then I run 6 inch high quality ts cables from that to the digitakt inputs. This gives a silent noise floor on the digitakt. The indicator doesn’t jump at all when I hit sample, there is nothing until I send something to it. Anyway just felt like posting this in case anyone else has cash to dump and is as annoyed with this kind of thing as myself. The radial box I’m using is a PRO ISO Stereo Line Isolator. I’m running balanced xlr off my mixer to a balanced patchbay then balanced trs off on the snake where I take that trs and use a converter to get to xlr. Lots of crap in that chain but it is very quiet. Balanced audio is awesome.
Edit: the adapters I got are garbage. Somehow they kill the low end on the signal. I don’t know how they messed this up. I’m assuming the wiring is not simply passing trs to xlr and is doing something else. I might take a multimeter to one to see what’s up but avoid these if you want to convert trs to xlr.
Luckily I found a short trs to xlr and a long enough xlr to run to my setup. Just need mono for the digitakt since it makes a stereo signal mono anyways. So I let my mixer sum to mono before sending it. From my testing all seems fine now and I still have my silent floor. Those adapters are baffling. I’ll post what the circuit is doing. Either something stupid or at least one of the ones I got is bad.