Buzz, noise and hum are something that can feel like an uphill battle when performing, writing and recording music, especially in a home studio.
Buzz, noise and hum can feel like an uphill battle when you’re performing, writing and recording music, especially in a home studio. Additional gear can’t do much if the power in your home studio is already dirty or struggling to keep up. Power conditioners can help there, while different cables suit different jobs, depending on length, connection type and signal requirements.
Our spare bedrooms aren’t built for perfect sound, let alone for critical listening when it comes to mixing and mastering, so we’re always battling the elements. Some gear needs balanced cables – three-pin connections with a hot, cold and ground signal that offer 3dB more signal than the hot-and-ground of unbalanced. Balanced is also best for long cable runs, for speakers, microphones and outboard.
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Getting your studio right, from the start
It always amazes me how musicians can spend exorbitant amounts on their equipment, then baulk at the cable to join it all up. Why take a two-thousand-dollar amp and a four-thousand-dollar guitar and decide a twenty-dollar cable between the two will be just fine?
More expensive cables cost more for a reason: they offer better quality. So many musicians think this doesn’t matter, and then destroy their tone with a cheap cable.
The same goes for your studio gear. If you’re going to invest so much of your hard-earned money on a top-notch computer and outboard gear, why let it down with ratty cabling in between? I’m not just talking about microphone or instrument cables, but your IEC power cables and USB cables too. You can get these for a small investment and they’ll work, but higher-bandwidth USB cabling helps you get the best out of your gear, sending and receiving audio quickly between equipment.
Power cables are another important one. Each bad cable might introduce a little hum, eventually summing to a louder, more unpleasant noise. Expensive power cables exist to make sure quality power reaches quality equipment.
Cheap cables can cost more in the long run
Top-notch cabling gets you better audio and a longer lifetime, so cheaper cables can end up costing you the same or more overall. Some pricier cables come with a lifetime warranty, so if you’re replacing a cheaper one every two or three years as it breaks down, how much are you really paying? Doing away with the anxiety of a faulty cable is enough for me.
Respect your gear
If you value your home studio, respect it enough to join it all up with the right cables. Wherever possible, use balanced cables for all connections as a basic rule, unless otherwise stated. I’ve invested in some older, analogue gear that uses unbalanced connections like RCA plugs, or speakers with panel-mount connectors or binding posts, so it isn’t always possible – but it’s the rule to aim for.
This balanced-cable rule is basic, but often overlooked. Why use a balanced TRS when a guitar cable will do the job? Because it doesn’t really do the job you want it to.
Unbalanced instrument cables are susceptible to interference, especially in longer lengths and when running across power cables. You can’t avoid this with unbalanced instruments like guitars, but you can control it by using shorter cables, keeping them clear of power sources and getting them into a balanced signal path as soon as possible.
Watch your connections
Another problem with unbalanced cables: the cold connection (as in hot, cold, ground) can make contact with the sleeve of your guitar’s cable, usually ground, sending signal to the wrong place and, more often than not, sending ground hum through your gear. The hot signal will almost always be correct, but the ring and sleeve might be mixed up.
One more warning – while speaker cables and guitar cables might share the same connector, an unbalanced 1/4″ jack, they are not interchangeable. Speaker cables use thicker-gauge wire to handle the amplifier’s load, whereas a guitar cable is made to transmit just the tiny blip of signal from a guitar’s pickups.
Recording with balanced cables
When recording in your home studio, you’ll use balanced cables almost exclusively, and for good reason. There’ll be a lot of cables, sometimes criss-crossing, and balanced cables help attenuate and eliminate the interference that causes. The outboard gear you’re acquiring will often be built to receive a balanced signal, and while feeding it an unbalanced signal may work, it won’t work exactly as expected – or optimally!
