Balanced Or Unbalanced Cables For Synth

The main difference comparing balanced vs unbalanced cables is a balanced cable has 1 additional conductor.

Balanced or unbalanced cables for synth.

I m trying to understand when to use balanced and unbalanced cables once and for all. If the synth has 1 4 6 3mm jacks for outputs they are very likely unbalanced and using balanced cables will not be of a benefit. Most audio interfaces have inputs which are properly wired to support both balanced and unbalanced 1 4 connections although some are auto switching while others have a physical line inst switch line balanced inst unbalanced. Some higher end synths may have xlr output jacks which are balanced and balanced cables are what would be used.

The roland instruction manual does not mention whether i should use balanced or unbalanced cables. You can with some caveats. The advantage of using balanced cables to connect between balanced outputs and balanced inputs is that balanced connections have better noise rejection thanks to a second inverted signal that has equal resistance to ground as the initial signal this inverted or reverse polarity signal is used to cancel noise and to make the signal more robust. A typical unbalanced cable like a 1 4 instrument cable has 2 conductors.

Just use good quality ts to ts type cables. The balanced cable will have 1 hot 1 cold and a ground shielding. The 1st conduction is the audio signal itself and the 2nd is a ground and often a shielding. The diagram above shows how the cable works.

A balanced audio cable has a ground wire but it also carries two copies of the same incoming audio signal sometimes referred to as a hot positive and cold negative signal. The structure of a balanced audio cable is similar to an unbalanced cable with one addition. All others are unbalanced outs and ins. This is especially true if it needs to be used in an environment where there s a lot of lights and other stuff that could cause interference.

Unbalanced cables work great for connecting a guitar to an amp for instance but because they are not very good at suppressing noise from outside interference unbalanced cables should have a maximum length of 15 20 feet 4 6 meters especially when used in noisy environments and with signals that are low level to begin with such as those from keyboards guitars mp3 devices and so on. Unbalanced cables aren t good for doing long cable runs for this reason in fact you should be using balanced ones if the cable needs to be more than 10 15 meters long. Use unbalanced cables when you have unbalanced instrument outputs. It s the sequential circuits pro one it doesn t give sound if you put in a balanced jack.

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