crap, i am even more confused now. How about this, lets just say i plug into the wrong one. Like say i have an unbalanced signal, and i plug into pin 2 hot (positive), what will happen?
thanks
LOL dont be!
Lets say for argument sake you just want to record a feed from a console and you dont have any room mics..
Your recorder has an unbalanced input. So that means 1/4 or stereo 1/8th you then connect the wrong pin from the console to your recorder.. Say pin 2 ( when the console output was actually pin 3 hot) What will happen...
You will get audio that is 180 degrees out of phase from the original source. Is that a big deal?? well some people say that it makes a huge difference on playback because your speakers are not moving in the same direction with reference to the actual performance. Some people say they can hear it.
So lets add a pair of room mics to this equation...
You have a pair of room mics and some sort of mixer to mix the signal from the room mics and "combine" it with the board feed. Now if your board feed is not in phase with your mics you have what is called "phase cancellation" that means your mics vs your source are 180 degrees out from one another.
What will that do? create comb filtering at certain frequencies and generally speaking create a recording that is substandard. From what it would have been if the polarity was correct.
Remember polarity is absolute something is ether positive or negative. Phase is not absolute and changes with frequency shorter wavelengths are less subjected to phase cancellation due to the shortness of length in real space that they need to develop fully ( high frequency ) so you might not notice high frequency phase cancellation as much as low frequency because of the wavelength. So when you have two sources that are combined that both have the same polarity and phase you get a summation of frequencies usually in the low end resulting in a recording that has better bass response.
A tell tail sign of phase cancellation can be a reduced bass response in a recording ( not always the case ) but its a good rule of thumb if you had 4 tracks and they were stereo pairs one set was a pair of mics the other was left and right from the console and you reversed the phase of one pair by 180 degrees and all of a sudden you have better bass response you can bet that something was not correctly wired and one pair was out of phase.
I know its complicated but you asked
Chris