[Scott Dorsey]

George's Pro Sound Company wrote:
let me go way out on the limb here
and risk the wrath of the pro recording community
for under 100$ you can make a dozen 1 female to two male passive splitters

this will give you "your own" feed to your mixer

This is true, and if all the system grounds are correct, everything will
work fine doing this.

There are two problems with this method. First of all, not all the PA systems
you deal with will have proper ground configurations. In fact, most of them
won't. The second problem is that there will be political arguments about
whose responsibility problems are when they turn up. The transformer splitter
avoids the arguments.

You will encounter PA guys who just plain won't put a passive-Y in front
of their system. It doesn't matter if it is going to cause a problem or
not, they won't even try it.

I don't know of a mic today that reacts badly to a simple 2 way passive
split.

This is because most inexpensive consoles today have fairly high-Z inputs
and it's more common that they don't load the mike _enough_ rather than
that they load it too much. You may even find that the mike (especially
something like an SM-57) sounds _better_ with the double load on it.

Impedance matching used to be the main argument for the splitter, and it's
seldom a good argument today. I mean, we do sometimes encounter transformer
isolated consoles with low-Z inputs, but not s often.

I invested heavily in iso's and broadcast splits andhave never found the
investment was worth it
with Jensens at around 60$ each it got real expensive real fast

Yes, I think the big deal with the original poster was that he only needed
a couple channels. It helps if you're just pulling vocals off rather than
grabbing all the sends off the board.

I have not found anyone yet who can tell what was done through the iso's and
what was done on a simple passive split snake

Frankly, this is an argument in favor of the isolation system you bought...
most of the isolation transformers degrade the sound somewhat.

I can count on one hand with four fingers left the number of times I have
needed the ground lifts on my Radial Convertible big concert snake.

Yeah, but it sure saved your rear when you did, didn't it? That's the
thing about stuff like splitters.... sometimes you don't need it, but
when you do, you're really glad you do.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."