How to Connect a Turntable to a Mixer

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Gary Vandy from garyvandy.com here at Studio Center. In this clip we're going to talk about how you connect a turntable to a mixer. Turntables are high impedance devices. Basically there's a big difference between high impedance and low impedance. Most professional mixers are low impedance devices which means they're balanced whereas a high impedance device is not balanced. So whenever you connect a high impedance device to a low impedance device, you're going to need an adapter. On top of that, phono pre-amps have a very low low output and they have a very specific pre-amp that is necessary to bring them up to volume so they can actually be used inside a low impedance device. That's called a phono pre-amp. The way you connect a phono pre-amp to a mixer basically is you'll have a turntable will have these kinds of plugs out of them. These are RCA plugs OK? These RCA plugs are generally red and white OK? You want to make sure that the red end is connected to the red output of the turntable and the white is connected to the white. Same thing as when you go into the phono pre-amp. The other end of this cable will go into a phono pre-amp, make sure the red is connected to the red and the white is connected to the white. If you have a professional phono pre-amp, it's going to have balanced outputs which means they're going to have balanced outputs that can be connected to a mixer or to a professional piece of gear. Once you have that output ready, what you do is you put it into a direct box or you have to put it to a line input to a mixer. The line input to mixer then comes through channels in the mixer and is brought up just like any other device on the faders and goes to your master output."