Connecting a Juicedlink CX211 to a Tascam DR100

M

MagicMountainMan

Member
Hi everyone,

I have a Tascam DR 100 and a Juicedlink CX211 and I'm looking to pair them somehow in order to use the cleaner preamps of the Juicedlink to boost the signal to the DR 100. (I have a Rode NTG 2, low sensitivity...)
Anyhow, I know that the Juicedlink only outputs at mic-level and the only inputs on the Tascam that takes mic-level are the XLRs. I have an old XLR to 3.5mm converter but using that in succession with a 3.5mm wire (a 6 inch variant) from the Juicedlink to the Tascam yielded unusable results. The audio cut in and out as I moved the wire and overall it was extremely hissy as if something in my parade killed the signal, but I'm not sure what part it was.

Does anybody have another solution that they have used to connect a mic level preamp to an external recorder? So far, the only thing I've thought of would be to use this; the only difference being that it's one piece instead of two, like my previous solution.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
 
The Hosa cable you linked to would NOT work properly - it would utilize only one channel in the recorder, putting the left channel signal from the Juice on pin 2 of the XLR and the right channel signal on pin 3, mixing them into a single mono channel with the two components 180 degrees out of phase with each other. Bad idea.

Think about this a minute - you're taking a mic level signal and sending it through the Juice but you're not amplifying it there. It's still mic level when it comes out. Then you send it to the Tascam and it goes through the same poor preamps it would have gone through had you left out the Juice altogether, plugging the mic directly into the recorder to begin with. You're not actually gaining anything and the additional complexity of the system actually increases the number of potential failure points, as you already discovered with your noisy adapter connection. To accomplish what you want you really need to use a true mixer instead of the Juice so you can amplify the mic signal to line level in a device wiuth clean preamps before passing it on to the Tascam, feeding the recorder through its line-level inputs. But even that might not actually avoid the recorder's mic preamps - cheap devices frequently just pad their line level inputs down to mic level and send them on through the same preamps anyway. It's cheaper to do it that way than it is to bypass the line signals around the mic preamps.
 
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Are you sure that the preamps on the DR100 are inferior to the Juiced Link? You might want to do a bit of testing on that one.

Grant
 
Thanks for the responses guys.

Ggrantly, I haven't directly compared the two recording the same audio side by side, but I can say with certain confidence that the preamps sound better in the Juicedlink.

Steve, thanks for the info. The reason I felt like it might be worth it was because boosting the signal using better preamps into the recorder with worse preamps would yield a better sound with less noise. Guess not.

Anybody know of a small solution that doesn't cost $700 like the Sound Devices products?
 
MagicMountainMan said:
Thanks for the responses guys.

Ggrantly, I haven't directly compared the two recording the same audio side by side, but I can say with certain confidence that the preamps sound better in the Juicedlink.

Steve, thanks for the info. The reason I felt like it might be worth it was because boosting the signal using better preamps into the recorder with worse preamps would yield a better sound with less noise. Guess not.
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But with your proposed scheme you're really not boosting the signal with better quality preamps (assuming for the moment the Juice really is better than the DR100), at least not a lot. The signal enters the Juice at mic level and leaves it at at perhaps a somewhat higher mic level, then gets its final boost in the DR100's preamps.

Anybody know of a small solution that doesn't cost $700 like the Sound Devices products?
Click to expand...
You get what you pay for ...
 
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