Plenty of 4 track cassette recorders have unbalanced mic inputs (I’m looking at you, 414 mkii). It can be frustrating, and I find the buzz pretty unbearable when plugging in a balanced mic cable, like with an XLR to 1/4″ cable. Instead of buying a whole pile of additional cables, I decided instead to build the Unbalancer.
Quite simply, the Unbalancer has XLR female jacks on one side, and 1/4″ jacks on the other side, with pins 1 and 3 connected on the XLR jacks. I made some short patch cables to come out of the unbalanced side to go into the mic/line inputs of a 4 track recorder. I settled on 6 channels because I also have a Tascam M-106 mixer that also only has unbalanced inputs. This way, I don’t need a whole set of XLR to 1/4″ TS cables laying around, and I can just use whatever XLR cables I have access to.
