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REL Acoustics Connectivity Options
Why We Offer a Variety of Inputs and Outputs
The below text is a transcription of the video.
So, for someone new to REL, taking a look at the back panel can be a little bit daunting. Let’s admit it. You look back there. There’s a million inputs controls. Gold plated connectors Speak On connectors for the high level. What is all this stuff for? And why do we have it? I’m gonna do one quick thing to make this easier for you to understand because the Serie S and our reference products
have inputs and outputs. So right off the bat, simplify it. When you look at it, don’t get sort of awe struck by the ins and the outs. This is effectively what you’re dealing with. Right? You have a high level Speak On connection input. We’ll come back to that in just a moment. You have an XLR 0.1 input, and you have both stereo inputs.
So there’s an extra one down here, but I’m doing it for simplicities sake, stereo, low level input and an RCA 0.1. That’s really all there is to it. Now, why do we have these, let’s walk through this. Our preferred method for connecting up for both music and theater doesn’t exclude the use of 0.1, but our preferred mechanism for connecting up to your system is to connect to the speaker terminals on your main power amplifier. Why? We’re not using a single watt of power over here.
We have a, in this case, an enormous 800 watt amplifier. Very few of you are using more than a hundred Watts at home. So, what’s going on here. We want to be able to bring forward the sonic signature. Not only that amplifier, whatever the processor is, the interconnect cables, the way that that particular source, whether it’s Blu-ray or very high end digital front end, if it’s two channel, all of those feed forward
into our REL, so that exactly what’s being fed to your speakers is what we’re feeding to the REL. It’s the only way we can ensure that we exactly track the micro dynamics, the macrodynamic right the big stuff, the really delicate little stuff. That’s all the delicate harmonics dying away all of that needs to be built forward.
We don’t have the prior of capturing exactly the way that the rest of your system sounds. There are times when you can’t. Some people make some very, very nice high quality powered, active, loudspeaker. That have their own amplifier in many cases, in most cases they’re wireless. Right? And so, we can’t come off of that
speaker’s amplifier, it’s built in, it’s intrinsic. There are no outputs on it. Why would there be it’s built into the speaker. So that’s why we include the stereo low level inputs. And then for 0.1, that’s a pure theater function. LFE stands for low frequency effects. They’re really the biggest most bombastic special effects in a movie.
There are two ways traditionally of bringing them in this would come in from your receiver or your AV processor. You’re either coming in through XLR, which is a pro style connector and I wanna be clear, there’s not an intrinsic qualitative difference between RCA and XLR. Almost everybody assumes that XLR connectors and the signal of being fed is somehow mysteriously better.
It’s a balanced version of the RCA and in some cases, depending on how good and how committed the engineering team was of that receiver. It may in fact be better, particularly at noise rejection. So, if you’re having to run cables a very and I mean more than 40 feet, 60 feet and longer XLR makes a lot of sense, just from a pure functionality standpoint, it’s quieter, it’s got a positive form, positive and a negative phase positive going back.
And so, you’ve got this very robust signal. For most of us in a normal home, you’re talking maybe 30 feet maximum, typically between your processor and your subwoofer. Is it really, really critical? No, but it’s nice to have it as options. So, we give you both, right and that’s really it as far as the input connectivity goes, and I’ll take this off. We then, because these are designed to be stackable into line arrays, a total of three.
We give you inputs here. Outputs here ditto, input here, output here and right on down the line. So that’s the duplication. It’s not there to be needlessly obsessive, or to be confusing to you. We just need twice as many connectors to offer that facility of being able to jump up to the middle sub from a line array and from the middle to the highest.
Hope that answers your questions. It’s why we do what we do, and it really is grounded in knowing what produces the best results in every combination possible.