Sharing Inputs and Outputs

You’d think that wiring would be simple. An instrument, a cable, an amp. A microphone, a cable, an audio interface. It has not worked out that way for me. Instead it is a giant spaghetti monster of cables, mostly XLR, but some guitar and lots of power because of course, none of this stuff runs on the static electricity in the atmosphere.

I have a need to take the output from a board and send it to either, a pair of FRFR monitors in stereo, or to the inputs on an Apollo interface in stereo. I have cable pairs run to both. But it means connecting and disconnecting and all that wire is either everywhere or tidied up out of the way. Given how often I switch, the layout is the former.

I also have a Kemper Stage and a Neural Quad Cortex. I need to send either of them to the Apollo but not simultaneously. I would also like to send them occasionally to the FRFR pair.

I could have something built, but I don’t have that kind of money.

I figure that by the time I make this work, I will have built a gravity well out of cables and managed to confuse myself totally. So I am breaking the project into two separate pieces.

In scenario one, I have one input and two potential outputs, so a 1 in 2 out switcher would do the trick. In scenario two, I have two inputs and one output so a 2 in and 1 out would work.

Ideally a selectable 3 in 3 out would be good, but I have yet to find a cost-effective device that is all XLR. Plenty of RCA based options, but I want to stick with balanced lines.

I did find options from Douk Sound called Nobsound Little Bear boxes. I ordered a 1 in 3 out and a 3 in 1 out from Amazon. Douk does have a 3 in 3 out but it’s only XLR on 2 sets of ports. You know what? For under $80 CAD for each of them, they work a charm and are completely silent in terms of added noise.

I could have built a patch bay, I built them when I was quite a bit younger for a few friends. I chose not to do so. I bought the Little Bear units and they work so well, I bought one more of each to make all the connections work, and also to try to simplify switching the monitor outs from an Apollo interface or a RODEcaster to share a pair of studio monitors. That cost me as much as the switcher in high quality 1/4” TRS to XLR cables but if it works, it will solve the monitor sharing problem that I wrote about in the reviews of the Mackie Big Knob Passive and the Behringer Studio M, solutions that should have done the job but add so much noise at unity volume as to be utterly useless.

If the idea of these little switchers makes sense to you, I’d recommend grabbing them quickly. They have vanished from the Douk Sound website and while Amazon Canada (where I live) still had limited stock, I suspect that once they are gone, they are gone. Which makes as much sense as anything else given how well they work. Recommended.

Thanks for reading. If you have any questions, post them via this link. Until next time, peace.