UR242, Phantom power to TRS?

Steinberg Hardware
#1

It appears the 242 applies phantom power to the TRS connection as well as the XLR connection, as opposed to the 22k11 which sensibly includes capacitors between these two connections, so the TRS doesn’t carry phantom power. I have ordered a 242, I will not be using phantom power, instead I will have my keyboard plugged into inputs 1&2.

I also have a toddler who likes pressing buttons.

Have I made a mistake entrusting Steinberg to supply me equipment without a “destroy your equipment” button"?

I mean seriously, if someone wants to use phantom power, keep it on the XLR, that consumer can buy appropriate cables. For the sake of four capacitors, sheesh.

If a TS cable simply grounds the phantom power on the input it’s connected to without doing any damage to anything, perhaps I have no reason to fret. The 242 manual provides a disclaimer of “don’t use phantom power for anything but…”, so I presume the design is a big problem. If it is a big problem, a conscientious manual would explicitly say “do not apply phantom power with a ts cable attached.”

I will have to decide if I void my warranty by completing the product, or return it because this design is dangerous for my keyboard. If I don’t get an answer here, my multimeter will provide one.

#2

OK, I’ve received the 242. The phantom power doesn’t appear to be on the TRS connection according to my meter, I’m assuming it’d be detectable even without load. There appears to be some capacitors around the neutrik connector, so the manual is kind of wrong - it doesn’t show the capacitors as the 22mkII does. It looks like the author of the manual also read the wiring diagram as I did.

I get a lot of noise from the computer leaking into the rear audio outputs. This noise is always present and isn’t affected by the amp volume. Curiously, the headphone port don’t carry this noise, although if I output to the mixer and use the headphone output on the mixer, the noise is present again with the only ground connection to the computer being the USB ground. Quite confusing. Better PSUs make a little difference, also plugging the amp in further away from the computer on a different circuit helps. I don’t have balanced outputs on my amp, but I don’t think it would improve much given the ground will still be used.

The MIDI seems to work well and doesn’t make the system noisy if I’m using the headphone output.

I’d like to know if this noise is normal, it seems that if the headphone line can be clean, the other outputs should be able to be made clean.

#3

Ok, I bought a Hifime High-Speed USB Isolator which does 480Mbps. The cheap $20 units don’t allow connection to the UR242 (the power led blinks). The Hifime isolator works (although sometimes needs a disconnect reconnect to initialise). I have perfect sound with zero noise interference from the computer. Now I have a Cubase midi problem (Cubase won’t trigger my XP-80, I have followed Roland’s instructions to the letter and have switched the XP to test mode to confirm the midi ports are working, which they are). I will start a new thread for this.