Your cable choice matters more than you think

If you've ever run a long instrument cable to your console and wondered why it picked up a ton of buzz, but your mic cable running even farther stayed perfectly clean - the answer comes down to balanced vs unbalanced audio.

It's one of those concepts that affects every connection on your stage. And once you understand it, a lot of common noise problems start making sense.

An unbalanced connection uses two conductors - one signal wire and one ground. Simple, but vulnerable. Any electrical interference along that cable (lighting dimmers, power cables, wireless devices) gets picked up by the signal wire and rides straight into your input.

The longer the cable, the more noise you collect. That's why instrument cables should stay short. Under 20 feet is ideal.

Common unbalanced connectors include TS (Tip-Sleeve) 1/4" cables (your standard guitar cable) and RCA connectors (consumer audio gear, DJ setups).

A balanced connection uses three conductors: two signal wires (one normal, one inverted) plus a ground.

When interference hits a balanced cable, it affects both signal wires equally. At the receiving end, the input flips the inverted signal back to normal and combines the two. The audio adds together correctly, but the noise - identical on both wires - cancels itself out.

This is called common-mode rejection, and it's why you can run balanced cables 100 feet or more without picking up significant noise.

The two balanced connectors you'll see most are XLR (the standard for microphones and professional audio) and TRS (Tip-Ring-Sleeve) 1/4" cables used for balanced line-level connections between gear.

Here's where people get tripped up.

Headphone cables also use TRS connectors, but they are NOT balanced. A headphone TRS cable carries left channel, right channel, and ground. It's a stereo unbalanced connection.

You can't plug headphones into a balanced TRS output on your console and expect it to work. Same connector, completely different wiring.

The challenge in most church setups is connecting unbalanced sources - guitars, bass, keyboards, laptops - to your balanced console inputs that might be 50-100 feet away through a stage box.

That's where DI boxes come in. A DI box converts an unbalanced, high-impedance signal to a balanced, low-impedance signal. But it actually solves three problems at once: balanced conversion, impedance matching (so your instruments sound the way they should), and ground loop elimination (that annoying 60 Hz hum).

I go deeper on active vs passive DI boxes, when to use each type, and my specific recommendations in the full blog post.

Until next time,

Drew

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