OK, this is a bit of an odd question, but I'm going to ask it anyways. I have the Outlaw 7500 (and love it) connected up to a Yamaha RX-V1600. Right now it is connected via Outlaw RCA cables from the pre-amp outputs on the Yammie to the RCA inputs on the 7500. Originally, I had a fair bit of the ground loop hum, which I tracked down to the cable line (95% sure). I installed the Jensen VRD-1FF Isolator, which did get rid of the hum (woohoo!). However, occasionally some of my HD channels suffer from macroblocking artifacts and sometimes the tuner is not even able to tune in the station all together. My other HDTV with no audio system connect, just audio from the TV itself, doesn't seem to suffer from this problem whatsoever.

Long story short, Markertek seems to have some RCA to XLR cables that I hoped might allow me to remove the Jensen isolator and also not have the hum. Do you think that this might work?

I know that the real problem is to fix the ground loop problem, but the cable company insists that the cable system is grounded correctly, and I don't want to use one of those "cheater" plugs.

Thanks for your input,

Tom

I tried this by manufacturing my own RCA to XLR. You end up shorting one of the pins of the XLR to the shield of the cable. in the RCA. It won't work to eliminate the hum. The best way is XLR To XLR

That's what I thought. Thanks for saving me some money on cables I didn't need. I'll just wait for the Outlaw 990 follow-on product. I want balanced outputs and HDMI switching. I hope it will be worth the wait.

Tom

If the 990 is any indication, I think it will be worth the wait.

Oh and if balanced outputs and HDMI switching are all you want, the 990 meets those requirements.

DVI and HDMI switching are essentially the same thing.

However, if you want a preamp that can handle HDMI 1.3 audio streams and perhaps do upconversion from any video input to HDMI at 1080P, then yeah, you'll want to wait.