what's up guys it's Tom welcome back to another video a few months back I posted
a video about how I set up my Yamaha in s10 M studio monitors got a lot of good
feedback from that video and one of the comments on that video asked how do I
even connect speakers like this to my audio interface so today that's what
we're going to talk about I'm gonna show you guys exactly how to connect passive
studio monitors to your audio interface most of the studio monitors that are
made today are active studio monitors and what does that mean basically what
it means is you plug in your cable you turn on the power and the speaker works
it's because the speaker has a power source built into it passive studio
monitors are what they might sound like there is no onboard power source so to
get sound from your computer through the interface to the speakers you have to
have an external power supply or what one would call an amp
now with an active speaker you can use your kind of standard quarter-inch style
TRS cable but with passive studio monitors you have to go back to the good
old fashioned speaker wire so to make all this happen here's what we're gonna
need we need our computer our interface we need our power amp and then lastly we
need our speaker first things first let's connect our computer to our audio
interface now for this video I'm using the M audio fast-track Pro it's just a
simple little interface that I had lying around I'm not going to pull my main
interface out of my rack this will serve our purposes just fine we're going to
connect the computer to the audio interface make sure we're getting sound
and then from there we need to connect the audio interface to our power amp now
there are a couple ways you can do this one is to just take this speaker wire
and plug it directly into the back of the amp and then plug it directly into
the back of the speaker but there is a little thing that can make your life a
lot easier and it's called a banana plug and it looks like this basically what
happens with a banana plug is you can thread the speaker wire into either side
of the plug you have a stereo connection and then you can just plug that into the
back of your power amp it makes your life a lot easier than it would be if
you were back there unscrewing the little things trying to plug in your
speaker wire that's a huge pain you don't have time for that no we've
connected the speaker wire to the amp it's time to connect it to the speaker
now what I like to do to make sure that I have the right connections is before I
plug anything in I make a little black mark on the corresponding ends of the
speaker cable that way I know which one's positive and which ones negative I
can make sure I don't switch those signals from the amp to the speaker
pretty self-explanatory there's black and red on the back of the amp and
there's black and red on the back of the speaker just plug the correct ones into
the correct sides and you're good to go and just like that now that everything
is connected it's time to hit play
and that is how you connect a passive studio monitor to your interface one
additional step from active it's worth it these old-school speakers sound great
I love my ns tense my mixes have gotten loads better since I started using them
if you want to give him a shot this is how you hook them up hit me in the
comments let me know if there's something else you want me to distill
down you want to learn as always thank you for watching I hope this video helps
and I'll catch you on the next one peace