studio cabling

[rispsira]

I was wondering what you guys would do in this situation:

Long story short we are going to have instrument cables of approximately 5 to 6 meters long from the control room to another room which is too long.

I have made some research here and please correct me if im wrong but i believe most of you agree that it wont be a problem for mic cables and power cables of heads but i believe this distance is too long for instrument cables.

So what would be the solution? a buffer?

Any advice?

 

[jipchen]

In my experience it is no problem at all. Hell, most normal guitar cables are six meters and I've used them for years without any loss (Sommer XXL Instrument cables).

As a matter of fact, sometimes I run an instrument cable from the controlroom to the liveroom and it's 25 Meters, never heard a noticable difference honestly. I don't use it for recording though, because long speaker cables are far less critical but I wouldn't have a problem if someone brought a combo and I had to use the long instrument cable.

There are other solutions, though: http://www.thomann.de/gb/radial_engineering_sgi.htm

 

[rispsira]

thanks for the answer man! i am just trying to help out a friend who is building a studio and ran into this issue. I told him what i read here about speaker and mic cables but that i wasnt sure about such a length for guitar cable.

I mean long guitar cables can be even good for some rig if it is made on purpose (i guess in the case of a harsh rig?) but he is going to be using that for recordings.
I will definitely tell him to check out the radial box. Seems like radial have a solution for everything!

thanks again for taking the time man

 

[Uros]

Go as short as possible for instrument cables (for ex. 1.5m or less), and with speaker cable you can go to decent lengths, like 20m or so.

 

[Empathy]

Go as short as possible for instrument cables (for ex. 1.5m or less), and with speaker cable you can go to decent lengths, like 20m or so.

And here I always thought it was the opposite way around. Figured unshielded speaker-cable should be as short as possible to dodge interference, while shielded instrument cables wouldn't have that problem.

 

[Mishbang]

And here I always thought it was the opposite way around. Figured unshielded speaker-cable should be as short as possible to dodge interference, while shielded instrument cables wouldn't have that problem.

It's to do with impedance and sound quality rather than interference from long cables. Speaker cables carry a low impedance high current signal and aren't having tonnes of gain added to the signal so they won't lose much quality or get noisy over long runs while guitar cables become more susceptible to noise and lose high frequencies the more cable is added because capacitance increases...I think haha

 

[Empathy]

It's to do with impedance and sound quality rather than interference from long cables. Speaker cables carry a low impedance high current signal and aren't having tonnes of gain added to the signal so they won't lose much quality or get noisy over long runs while guitar cables become more susceptible to noise and lose high frequencies the more cable is added because capacitance increases...I think haha

Yeah that sounds about right. Seems to be a win/lose situation in both regards then. Thinking about it again, you shouldn't need to worry about interference in a properly constructed studio as much as you would in live sound.

 

[Uros]

Yeah, just don't run your mic/speaker cables close to power cables, and you are good.

 

[rispsira]

thanks guys. In the case of my friend there is gonna be another way with shorter instrument cable but sometimes depending on how busy things are there will be no other option than to have to use the long instrument cable. So i told him about the radial thanks to jipchen; hes gonna be looking for some sort of solution like that.