Balanced Or Unbalanced Instrument Cable

The structure of a balanced audio cable is similar to an unbalanced cable with one addition.

Balanced or unbalanced instrument cable.

Use balanced cables for balanced equipment and unbalanced cables for everything else. Connecting a keyboard with unbalanced ts outputs to the unbalanced input on a di box or the instrument input on a mixer. 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. Most unbalanced music instrument cables have two conductor wires.

Balanced vs unbalanced cables. I m surprised to say that i did indeed hear a difference. A typical unbalanced cable like a 1 4 instrument cable has 2 conductors. Hi hats and cymbals were a lot crisper and.

Of course things are rarely so simple and straightforward in the audio world so a little more detail is in in order. One wire carries the signal and is referred to as the hot line. The other is the ground wire that s connected to to an insulated wrap and is also called the common ground earth or shield. It wasn t huge but noticeable enough to consider upgrading my own cable.

The 1st conduction is the audio signal itself and the 2nd is a ground and often a shielding. Can i use a trs cable as a ts cable. 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 ts cables should be used with unbalanced input and outputs.

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. Trs cables can occasionally be used instead of a ts cable but the signal is still unbalanced. The balanced cable conveyed a tighter cleaner sound that made the mix from the unbalanced cable seem soft and unrefined in comparison. 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.

The diagram above shows how the cable works. The balanced cable will have 1 hot 1 cold and a ground shielding. With regard to balanced versus unbalanced instrument cables the simplest way to explain it is.