all right I'm Dave Rat and today I'm going to talk about audio Transformers
audio Transformers come in very handy they're great for ground
isolation getting rid of buzzes for splitting microphones and sending to multiple places and
people tend to use Transformers Willy Nilly they just put them away hey let's have a mic splitter
let's put Transformers in there we're going to run to two different places let's put Transformers
Transformers get used quite a bit especially in the older analog stuff but it's not uncommon
because they just solve problems they make it easy you've got a recording truck put a Transformer
split onto that recording truck and why would we not use them for just about everything whenever we
need to isolate or split because if you look at the specs for Transformers look at this
um radial js3 go on the site there we can look at the specifications and it's 20 to 20K plus
zero minus 1 DB or something like that off the top of my head you know extremely flat less than
point something or other phase shift throughout the response this is a a very high quality unit
same thing with this Whirlwind ISO II it's a two in two out the GS3 is a one in three out
two and two out isolation Transformer you plug it in and it's got the ability to give you isolation
and look at the specs I mean they're uh extremely flat and this radial ISO II twin ISO same thing
or similar thing to this uh the Whirlwind ISO two two in two out some switches and lifts and
um these things have incredible specifications and for all the people that love to look at
specs and curves and readouts you look at that and hey why would you even question whether or
not this is a flawless piece it has a pristine response and put it in line I've also got some
other ones here I've got this little Cinemag which is uh what rat uses in our ISO Splitters
um when we just when we have an ISO out and I've also got this Crimson one in two out and
I've just wired up some xlrs on the end of this so that we can test those as well and
we have some Splitters with the crimsons in them as well as we've also used the Lundahl's
when I was starting the sound company I really really avoided Transformers at all costs I felt
that they sounded bad they heard the sound I they dropped the level I never trusted them in fact I
avoided them unless they were absolutely necessary all the old rat systems were all hardwired splits
and I built complex grounding schemes in order to get around using Transformers and then maybe
carry a Transformer with a malt in molt out they could hit a recording truck if need be
my aversion to Transformers I could actually tell by looking at my console if Transformers
were plugged in and I'm going to actually go through and test to see if this is a a myth
and I was barking at the wrong tree or actually there's some Foundation to what's going on because
here's the conflict the Transformers have pristine specs they shouldn't do anything
maybe they drop the level a DB who cares we can always turn the gain up no big deal
or is there something that we're missing and the Transformers are doing something more causing
issues that we don't expect which is kind of what my intuition and experience told me but I've never
gone through and tested and found that gremlin so today I'm going to look for those Gremlins
and what we'll do through the next video or series of videos is test several different microphones
oh I've got a test set up over here and I've got some cotton insulation piled up over a speaker
a two-way speaker and that's driven off this little amplifier
and the output of the speaker will put whatever signal that I've sent to it and then I put a
microphone on that the output of that microphone shows up at this y cable here and this y cable
goes one side into channel one of the console and the other side of the Y cable is here and
this is where we'll plug on various Transformers and then this goes to channel two of the console
so if I just plug this into here like this now the output of the microphone it's hardwired split
into two channels of the console just like it would happen with a Mains and monitor console
um at a show and if we just used hard wire if I take and put this ISO here in line
now I've got hardwired to the main or channel one and an ISO to Channel 2 like ISO to monitors or a
recording truck and the same thing so I can put different Transformers in there and we
can look at the frequency response in smart as well as hear what's going on I'll be listening
in the headphones and I'm also recording on a Tascam recorder here and what I'll do is I
will switch when I'm doing the test I will turn off this microphone above me and let
you hear just the signal that we're listening to and I'll try and do my best to carry that
through and give you enough time to hear what's going on I recommend using headphones or studio
monitor something that's got a wide frequency response for more critical listening than maybe
just using your phone for this although you will be able to see the differences on the
um some on Smart all right so let's go ahead and start with our first test here I've got a
um Audix analyzer RTA mic on there and if I turn on this sound bullet here it'll make pink noise
and it's coming out of the speaker going into the microphone and showing up here
on the console and we can see the response there now in order to
when we do later on when we do comparisons either in this or other videos what I've done is channel
one and channel two if I hit the polarity reverse on one of the channels and we pfl both of them
we should have a null and what I've done is I've node these two channels out such
that they cancel really well and we'll see this fall all the way to the ground
now I know that if we listen to channel one and channel compare to Channel 2 any differences we
hear are not from the console because the console is nulled very well and we see a little residual
there but not much it is a the cancellation is quite good all right so I'm going to go ahead and
take off this polarity verse and now they're going to sum instead of no well pfl just one of them
and we see now as far as the frequency response we see um you know it's a
speaker and a microphone the speaker's not flat since we're going to be comparing
the signal with and without the Transformer
we don't really care if it's flat what we care is the difference between the curves that we measure
so what I'll do I'll wait for my voice to settle here I'm going to go ahead and capture this
and there's our Baseline with the main PA with the microphone split hard wire
into two channels now what I'm going to do is unplug one of the channels
and Phantom Powers onto a little pop it shows up in there
and we'll look at the difference
so these are tracking pretty well let's go ahead and listen to the difference here
with the pop it's hard to tell um
but
we're not seeing a significant difference at this point
I can see a little more low end maybe it'll settle down
slight difference let's see how that compares to some other things that we do
let's go ahead and take the Whirlwind ISO 2.
and let's put that on the oh let's see we'll save this curve here the first one was split
and this one the second one is just a single input now let's go ahead and plug in the iso2
well that's interesting so if we look at these curves here we can see that when we plugged in the
iso2 and I could hear it a low end boost and we actually got more low end up in the 40 to 45 range
uh 40 to 50 range and we got less low end below 36 and down so it changed the
frequency response of the microphone now we're listening and looking at the microphone and this
is the front of house so what we're saying is that when we plug in
the isolation Transformer to plug in the monitor console it's altering the sound
of the mic in front of house everywhere the microphone itself is now sounding different and
this is interesting because this means that the Transformers altering the entire signal chain even
the things that aren't plugged into the transform and this is with a phantom powered condenser
microphone and the Whirlwind ISO II let's go ahead and do this again and let's do it with the
js3 splitter so we'll turn this on
and I'll plug it in first I'll plug in the js3 and we'll see what happens and
then I'll plug and unplug the output so we can try it with just the Transformer
plugged in and the Transformer loaded down plugged into another console Channel
all right I didn't see anything significant there I saw a little
bit of change this is falling in line it's making a slight variation
with this analyzer mic now let's try something a little different let's see what happens to a
dynamic microphone so I'm going to put this beta 58 on here and we'll do those same two tests
beta 58 going straight into a single console
removing phantom power until it makes no difference
unloaded and loaded and last before I close out this video let's go ahead and look at this js3
all right that's video one and we'll do more because it keeps going [Music] foreign
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