They can wear out, pick up interference, and different materials will conduct electricity better or worse than others.
Some terms you might see are balanced or unbalanced, low or high impedance, conductor material, strand count, and more. Most of them will be offered in different cable lengths, with longer cables tending to cost a little more than shorter ones. If you need to add some color to your studio, LyxPro has a bunch of different options for you and have lengths from 1. From here it is standardized.
The ground braided shield, remember connects to 1. The positive lead connects to 2 and the negative lead connects to 3. Which is positive and negative? Typically, the lighter cable is positive. As long as 2 connects to 2 on each end and 3 connects to 3, the cable will work. If you are going to be wrong, be consistently wrong.
They are arranged slightly differently between male and female. Pay attention or your cable might not work correctly. This has to do with how balanced cable mitigates noise over long cable runs. The specific answer involves phase cancellation and is well documented through the google. That is its own subject for another time.
Know that both leads and the ground! First, orient the ground, positive and negative of your cable to the correct contact as shown above. Using your helping hands to hold the cable and connector in position. Getting a good angle can take some adjusting.
Be patient and try not to force anything. A frustrated cable maker usually ends up with burns on their fingers Going in order, heat the connector contact from underneath until the solder melts. Using your small pliers or your fingers if you are a dummy like me push the tinned ground or lead into the liquid solder.
Remove the iron and let the solder cool to solid before letting go of the cable wire. Repeat for each lead and connector pair. Finished solders are clean without extra solder spilling off the contact. Leads and ground are well separated from each other, unlikely to make internal contact.
There are grooves that help you align the case correctly. On Neutrik brand connectors, there is only one possible way to put the case on. Everybody makes this mistake, usually once when you sit down to make a bunch of new cables.
If you have a multimeter , you can use it to test continuity of each pin of your XLR cable. Continuity mode on your multimeter makes a tone when the positive red and negative black probes make contact or touch opposite ends of a circuit, closing it. To test your cable, touch a probe to the corresponding pin on each connector end--i.
The bottom line is, always use the appropriate cable for the appropriate application. If you need to go out from an interface to a pair of monitors, invest in some XLR interconnects, and, of course, use a dedicated microphone cable for all mic and performance functions.
Everybody has different needs and different budgets to work with, and Hosa provides a wide array of solutions to fit any budget.
If you want the most noiseless, transparent microphone cable, we highly suggest our Edge Series microphone cable. If you need an XLR cable between analog devices carrying line-level, we always recommend our Pro Series interconnects. Up next… The Basics of Analog Cables In the recording studio, there are 2 types of analog cables : Balanced Unbalanced …that we use to transfer 3 levels of audio signal : Mic Level — balanced Instrument Level — UNbalanced Line Level — balanced Line level is the standard signal strength used with all pro audio equipment.
In terms of performance: Balanced cables are relatively immune to noise from interference such as radio frequencies, electronic equipment, etc. Up next… Analog Connectors Explained On either end of a balanced analog cable, you will find 1 of 3 connectors : XLR Male — which connects to various hardware inputs. XLR Female — which connects to the microphone, and various hardware outputs. As the two signals travel along the cable, BOTH wires gather noise, the same way unbalanced cables do, however … Before re-combining them at the opposite end of the cable, the polarity of the negative wire is flipped BACK, to once again match the positive signal.
Simply brilliant. For example, because guitar cables get too noisy beyond ft … A direct box aka DI, aka direct injection is commonly used to change the unbalanced guitar signal into a balanced mic signal … Which can then be extended for several-hundred-feet, through a standard XLR mic cable. And they wonder : How can that be, when one is mono , and the other is stereo?
As of though, here are the ones you should know: 1. Firewire — typically seen on pricier interfaces, it offers significantly faster speeds than USB. Thunderbolt — only seen on newer high-end interfaces, it offers unprecedented data transfer rates, previously only seen on dedicated PCIe processing cards.
Up next… 2. Up next… 3. Optical Cables By transferring information using a series of light flashes… Optical cables aka lightpipe cables , can carry multiple channels of digital audio through a single cable. Up next… 4.
BNC Cables Identical to the coaxial cables used to connect your cable TV… But with a different name and purpose… BNC cables are used in the studio to sync the internal clocks of multiple digital devices, whenever two or more are connected.
Up next… 5. Up next… 6. Cat5e Cables The same cables as those used with home telephones… Cat5e cables work great in the studio as well… Because of their ability to send BOTH a power source , and multiple channels of digital audio , through a single line…. The great thing about pro audio is, you use the same one for almost everything. So to conclude this post, here are 3 tips which help make it easier: 1.
0コメント